


And Then It Got Dark

by Roses



Series: Brothers in Arms [1]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Activism, Anger, Angst, Atheism, Dark, Death, Diary/Journal, Drama, Dreams, Elves, Fantasy, Gen, Hurt, Love, Love/Hate, M/M, Magic, Memories, POV First Person, POV Male Character, Past Relationship(s), Politics, Relationship(s), Terrorism, Tragedy, Travel, War, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-03
Updated: 2012-03-03
Packaged: 2017-11-01 01:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 62
Words: 32,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roses/pseuds/Roses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life and times of Gwillym Malik--an apostate mage and member of a Chasind minority living in southern Ferelden. A diary and travel narrative written while fleeing the Mage Tower and heading into the Blight towards his homeland with his former jailer. Reflections on his loves, his losses, the war  to free his people, and the plot that he once hatched to kill an Arl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 30 Harvestmere 9:30 Dragon

And then it got dark. 

We took precious little with us when we fled the Circle Tower, but Tristrum has given me paper and ink, and he tells me I should write. 

The wind that rakes across the moors outside our tent has brought the winter north out of the Korcari Wilds. By the time we pitched camp, night had already fallen. Each day feels like the passing of an age, but in truth we have precious few hours of daylight in which to press southwards towards Hinter and Cirsa's Crossing: the town where I grew up, and which has used up so many years of my life. 

Maybe Tristrum is right—perhaps writing all of this down will help to exorcise some of the darkness that has plagued me since we left the Tower. 

Somewhere behind the rending wind, I am certain I can hear the darkspawn howling and gibbering in the night. 

I am still barely strong enough to hold a pen, but I cannot sleep, and there are some things which must be said. 

When all of this is over, I only hope that some of what I shall say will matter.

That there is someone left alive to care.


	2. 2 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

Almost every common man and woman in the southern Hinterlands is descended from the Ascellan: A Chasind tribe who, in the days of myth, stood alongside their Ferelden cousins to drive back the darkness of the Tevinter Imperium. In the long years of the war, many generations of the Ascellan lived in the high lands to the west of Ostagar where they learned the skills which would see them settle in Ferelden forever: The ability to work with leather, metal and wood. 

For decades, the Ascellan forged Ferelden carts, weapons and armour to help them in their fight against the Imperium, and when the war was over, too much time had passed. The Ascellan could no longer remember how to live out of the Wilds as their ancestors had done. And so they remained in Ferelden. They accepted Ferelden rule, and they continued to provide Denerim with armour and with swords. 

Time untold has passed since the days when my people emerged from the Wilds and made the high places around the River Ispryn our own. And yet, our place today is little better, worse even, than it was when we battled the Imperium. For the Fereldens still consider us to be at least partially barbarian, and their Chantry still views us and our old religion as heresy, and us no more than savages. 

When the Fereldens fought against the Orlesians to reclaim their lands, Highmoor was one of the last arlings to fall to their revolution, and as a result of that every Ferelden in the Hinterlands now blames us for arming their oppressors. They fail to see one quintessential truth: That the Orlesians ruled over the Ascellan just as harshly as they ruled all of Ferelden, and that now that they have gone, it is the Fereldens themselves that have taken up their place. 

The people of Denerim think of us as ignorant and superstitious, when they think of us at all. 

But enough. I am exhausted from two days trudging through thick mud and high marshes, and we have precious little candlelight to spare.


	3. 3 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

Today, we have spent five hours heading south through the sheets of rain. Although we left the Circle almost a week ago now, our progress across the moorland has been perilously slow. 

I fear that if the templars were to mount an attempt to recapture us, then they would overwhelm us long before the weather was able to conceal our path across the highlands. 

Since the Blight, it feels as though it has been raining without respite. For the first few days of our expedition, that rain felt like the first touch of freedom on my skin after an age of imprisonment—pushing its cold fingers through my hair and running down my spine—but now it has long since become a constant torment to us both. Everything we own is wet and cold, and we wake each morning sick and shivering only to struggle through the rain for as long as both of us are still able. 

The injury to Tristrum's leg seems worse than I had thought, although he fights bravely on through the scrub ahead of me and provides me with a shoulder to lean into when I am no longer able to walk unaided. 

Starvation is still plaguing me. Every muscle in my body is wasted away and I am frequently crippled with bouts of colic. Still, I have managed to take in a little milk, if infrequently, and do seem to feel a little better for it. 

Tristrum is confident that we will make the Crossing before winter sets in upon the moors, and I am more than happy to put my faith in him for now.

The workings of the Fade are still eluding me however, and what little lyrium that we brought with us still burns my hands every time I touch it. 

It will pass, I'm sure of it. It has to. If I cannot begin to prove of some use in this endeavour, it may well be the end of us both.


	4. 4 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

When the Orlesians conquered Ferelden, it was almost a respite for the Ascellan. To the Fereldens, we were no better than savages. As far as Orlais was concerned, we were Ferelden dogs along with all the rest. That is not to say that the Orlesian occupation was any kind of golden age for us, but many Ascellan men and women achieved a degree of social mobility under Orlesian rule that had previously been denied to us.

My mother was one of the fortunate few. 

She was an armourer by trade, and her skill with her craft meant that her work was in demand as far afield as Orlais itself. She made a good life for herself, and soon began to operate for a go-between for the Orlesians and the Ascellan armourer's guild. 

My father, on the other hand, was an apothecary and an apostate mage. In my infancy, he would look after me while my mother was away on business. Then, one autumn when I was five or six years old he left—fleeing the templars of the Chantry in one of their many crackdowns on illegal magic workers. We never found out what became of him, but he never returned to us and I know that my mother went to her grave believing that he was killed by the templars somewhere out on the moors. 

When I was growing up, all that remained of him was the library of books on magic, herbalism and arcane lore that he left behind for me. That was how I learned my magic then: Not from the lies and myths of the Chantry, or from the superstitions and shamanism of my own people, but from the unpolluted stream of pure knowledge. I was provided only with theories and information, and left to draw my own conclusions about what all of it may mean.

In this way, I came to understand what so many people label 'magic' as a force at work within the universe that is as measurable and natural as the rising of the sun—albeit as beyond our comprehension. It is a force as natural as the tides, and not the proof of some invisible and fictitious creator at work in the world around us. Perhaps there are some that would place the sun and the tides within the domain of the _Maker_ as well, but I am most certainly not one of those people.

My father's library filled the space in my life where he should have been, and when I was old enough, my mother's skill and shrewdness paid for an education in Denerim where I would learn history, languages and the natural philosophies. 

I can remember very clearly the night before I left the Hinterlands for the first time in my life. All of my things were packed into travelling chests and had been placed by the door, and my mother came and sat down next to me.

“I know that you don't want to go, Will,” she told me. “But you must. You must build a better life for yourself. For _all_ our people.

“Learn everything that the Orlesians will teach you in the Chantry house, but never forget that they are not like us.

“Do not believe the lies that they will tell you about magic and the Maker. Those stories are chains that have been forged by the powerful to keep power in their own hands and shackles on the mages, the Chasind, and anyone else that they think is strong enough to threaten them.

“Do not doubt that you shall be in grave danger while you are there, Will. Both the blood and the lyrium that flows in your veins represent a grave threat to them, and should you be discovered for what you are, then you shall make yourself a target for their hatred.”

I left for Denerim with the dawn, and though it took me a long while to understand the truth in what she had told me, I never once forgot her words.


	5. 5 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

We walked for less than three hours today, and by my calculations we have covered little more than a mile.

The rain is incessant and turning to sleet, and the ground is so waterlogged that it collapses underneath our feet. Exhaustion and our collected injuries are plaguing us, and we have managed to stray into an area of marshland between two hills where there is nothing but water and sharp-edged reeds.

I caught a glimpse of the wound on Tristrum's leg today as he changed the bandages and pulled on the soaking wet travelling leathers that he wears underneath his armour. I am worried that it may be becoming infected. 

Working with lyrium is still beyond my abilities.

And yet we must push on. I shall not let us die out here, our corpses left for the encroaching darkspawn. 

We have both agreed to push on twice as hard tomorrow, and will rise an hour before dawn to break up camp.


	6. 7 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I am suffering today, and am too weak to leave the tent. But we have cleared that blighted marshland, and Tristrum believes that we are now far enough from the Circle that we may be allowed a day's respite.

I insisted that he allow me to redress his wounds. I treated and bound the gouge in his leg as best I could, but unless I can regain my ability to work magic, then I fear that his condition shall only get worse.


	7. 8 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

Today I am a little stronger, and the lyrium no longer burns me when I touch it. We took advantage of a small break in the weather, and have made almost four miles.

Neither of us are hungry, but we must force each other to eat little and often so that we may carry on. The exhaustion and frustration has us at each other's throats over the last few days. I worry that he is having second thoughts about what he has done. 

It is too late now. 

Now, we flee the Blight, almost as much as we flee his fellow templars.


	8. 9 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

While I was being schooled in Denerim, I learned everything that the Chantry sisters would teach me, and questioned every word that I was taught. 

I spent many long hours in the library just as I had once done at home, and eventually I got to know the sisters well enough that I was able to gain access to some of their most restricted collections—including their most guarded books of magic. 

It was in this way that I met Tibus and the circle of apostates that followed him. The mage's resistance that he belonged to had gone to great pains to access the Chantry library, and once we had gained one another's trust I spent many nights in the cellars and warehouses of Denerim fermenting a rebellion that would never come. 

We were young, naive, and not yet well organised enough to present any kind of real threat to the Orlesian authorities. But the mages that I met there were filled with the fires of revolution, and desperate to see that revolution come to pass. 

Tibus was always too impatient. 

I heard a few months after leaving Denerim that he had been cut down by the templars along with half his circle for attempting to attack the Chantry house. 

I could not say I was surprised.


	9. 10 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

It was also during that time in Denerim that I met Callista: A tempestuous Antivan girl who worked on the docks. And, just as many of my nights were spent plotting for freedom for all mages with Tibus and his circle, many of those long, hot summer days were spent in my room at the Chantry with Callista. 

She had come out of Antiva working the ships and looking for a better life. She was tall and fair-haired with a rich tan that lasted even through the dead of winter, and I loved her utterly and with all the reckless passion of youth.

When I was called back to the Crossing at the start of the Ferelden Uprising, she made me promise a hundred times that I would write to her.

I never did.

Those stormy autumn nights that I spent plotting revolution with Tibus had already begun to show me the kind of life that I would lead. Tibus once told me that I had the fire of an archdemon in me. That it frightened him.

I became convinced, the way we do in youth, that it would burn everything it touched. 

Once I returned to Cirsa's Crossing, I allowed that fire to consume me, and forgot that Callista had ever existed at all.


	10. 11 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

So far, I have avoided talking about the... dreams I have been having. 

I cannot bring myself to think of them as nightmares.

Either way, it would be naive of me to think that I left them behind at the Tower. The dreams have followed me out into these high places. 

Out onto the moors.

Morgan is the single thing that runs through all of them: As constant as an evening star. 

Every night I resign myself to a few hours of sleep before Tristrum wakes me and we keep on walking, and every night I feel as though I spend an eternity of afternoons with Morgan. 

No matter how much I have attempted to drive the last ten years between my waking hours and his memory, weakness and starvation have brought his spectre back to me at last. 

He looks older now. The years have started to silver his hair and softened the sharp angles of his face, but he only ever looks more beautiful. Morgan could only ever look more beautiful. 

Some of those endless days I experience each night, we are in my mother's cabin—the tiny little shack out on the moors where I grew up. We lie in bed and listen to the rain falling on the wooden roof, or watch it drive in sheets against the window.

On other nights, I dream of Terra's family home—of Rye and Astarte, and of little Will. I dream of endless meals held around the table (perhaps that is the hunger invading the space that I make for myself in the Fade). The children are playing. Terra is laughing and Morgan hooks his foot between mine or lets his fingers creep out across the table to touch the back of my hand.

It is not too difficult to ignore the spectre of Desire that hides behind his face, his greying hair, and the endless plains of green that are in his eyes.


	11. 12 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I slept badly last night.

I do not think that the spirit in my dreams sits too well with me talking about it. Perhaps it feels as though I am trying to offer it resistance—something which I have not yet found the strength to do.  
As a result, today I felt drained of all desire to go on, and every minute of the four hours we spent walking was a torture to me. 

Tristrum and I argued badly, and he spent at least an hour outside in the driving winter rain looking back towards Lake Calenhad. Back towards the Circle. 

But the storm seems to have broken, and we spent the rest of the evening talking with both of us too tired to really say anything at all. All the same, it has left us more at ease.

I need to go back to talking of the past. About everything that has brought me here. It may be the last chance that I have. 

Tristrum tells me that the sky in the east is on fire tonight, and we have high hopes that it will bring a break in this infernal weather. 

We have resolved to hold camp tomorrow. With luck, we will be able to dry out some of our equipment and supplies after so many days of rain.


	12. 13 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I was called back from Denerim before I had the chance to finish my studies. 

When I was seventeen years old, the Ferelden uprising began... and the whole world began to fall apart. 

I remember one day very clearly.

I had not long returned from Denerim, and had climbed up onto the mountainside with Rye and Terra—two childhood friends from whom I had been separated for far too long. 

I had begun to suspect that they had started to see one another in my absence, but so far neither of them had breathed a word of their affair to me. 

There are few flowers on the moorland up around the Crossing, but the ones we had were out in force that day. The whinflower painted the brown landscape in Ascellan gold, and we had settled down amidst the grass and scrub to eat the lunch we had brought up with us. 

It was a relentless summer, but the three of us had been reunited and we were in the best of spirits.

“This meat comes from the Crossing,” I told them. “You know that there are two families on the other side of the valley that have gone back to raising livestock?”

Terra chewed for a moment and tore off a crust of bread.

“That is your mother's doing, Will,” she said. “She has been telling everyone that we need to learn how to support ourselves again. That we can't rely on the food caravans that the arl sends south from Lothering.”

“Yeah, and she's right to,” said Rye. “I heard this summer's been even hotter up there. I talked to one of the wheelwrights that Tabitha ( _that was my mother's name >) has got growing vegetables down by the river where the wind can't get to them. He reckons that we're in for a bastard winter, too, and that if the harvest in Lothering fails then we're going to need all the help we can get. You really think that those Orlesian bastards will come to our rescue when they have a war to fight with the rest of Ferelden?”_

_“Maybe the Ferelden resistance can be petitioned for aid, then,” said Terra. “I'm sure that the arling of Highmoor would be a worthy prize for them.”_

_Rye shook his head._

_“Don't make me laugh, Terra. The Fereldens hate us even more than the Orlesians do.”_

_“They will be too busy fighting their own war to care about us,” I added. “The Fereldens are already undermanned and under supplied, and there's no way that they'll share what supplies they have with us.”_

_“But that only makes Highmoor even more important to them,” she insisted. “We are the Forge of Ferelden up here, after all.”_

_And she was right: The Ferelden resistance tried many times to wrest control of Highmoor from Orlais, but each time they were driven back, and the ancient castle at Hinter (which had been built by Ferelden in the wake of the Imperium to control the Ascellan uprisings) withstood all attempts to fell her._

_And as Rye had predicted, that winter brought snow four feet deep and a bitter famine right across the Hinterlands. With famine came death, and with death came rage and the first few embers in the forge of revolution._

_What harvest there was in Lothering the Orlesians sent north to feed their army at the expense of their armourers—a final act of desperation that came with a price in frozen corpses._

_By Guardian, the ground was still frozen solid and piled with snow in the windshadow of every wall and mountainside. Once again, Rye, Terra and I made the short climb from my mother's cabin up onto the mountain, and looked down upon the Crossing._

_The evening light was a mixture of sunset pink and Guardian blue, and the forges weaved their smoke and steam into the fading light as the moon rose low and full above the pale spectre of the Orlesian Highway—which we Ascellan called the Road of Bones—that struggled southwards through the snow._

_The Orlesians had begun building the road at the height of last summer in the hopes of better supplying their army, and hundreds of men and women (Ferelden and Ascellan alike) were said to have died in the work gangs. The road that would connect us to the Imperial Highway and the arlings in the north was literally paved with their bones._

_But the road was unfinished, Orlais was almost beaten, and the fires in the hearts of the men and women of the Crossing burned weak and painful in the endless winter nights._

_And yet we did all that we could. My mother understood the Orlesian desperation, and she argued and reasoned violently with our masters. Many of our own people thought that she had gone too far with her concessions—that, with her help, the Orlesians had starved many of our people to their deaths. But, to me at least, there was little denying that without her intervention, the situation could have been far worse._

_Either way, she was to pay for her part in dealing with the Orlesians in the end._

__

* * *

When Ferelden finally took control of Highmoor, I was working with a gang of cartwrights in the Crossing. 

It was hard, honest work, and I would have spent the rest of my life quite happily between the workshop and the forge. But the fire that had burned inside of me since Denerim had only been kindled through that long winter. I was determined that I should do _something_ , even if I did not yet fully understand what it would be.

King Maric finally succeeded in 'uniting' all of Ferelden beneath his rule and routing the Orlesians, and yet life in the Crossing grew little better for any of us. Maric saw one of his most trusted generals, Teiron Estraven, installed as arl of Highmoor, and overlooked the many hardships that he inflicted upon the people as long as the Forge of Ferelden kept on burning.

We Ascellan were blamed for aiding Orlais down to the last. Time and again, Ferelden men and women were given Ascellan lands from underneath our feet—including the few farms around the Crossing that my mother had been able to establish. They were appointed as our guildmasters, and oversaw the functioning of our workshops.

It was in the face of this almost overwhelming opposition that we first began to organise ourselves, and there were nights innumerable when my mother would call us around the table with the Ascellan work gang leaders to discuss the worst of our Ferelden guildmasters... and talk about what was to be done.

The summer became our striking season. Since the farms had been taken from us, it was the only time when we could scavenge enough food from the moors that we were not entirely dependant upon Ferelden coin and the Ferelden caravans. 

Terra was expecting her first child, and my mother was insistent that we should find someone to replace her at the forge when the time came for her to give birth. At the time, there seemed to be little sense in it to me. 

“Why should we bother?” I asked her. “The overseer is a Ferelden doglord like all the rest. He doesn't give a damn about any of us.”

“You need to look again,” she told me. “Haydan was kind to Terra when she fell sick just after she got pregnant. If we repay that kindness now, then we will have made an ally, and our allies are sill pitifully few. 

“Not everyone can be your enemy, Will,” she said. “You have to learn that.”

I did not reply, but she was right. Of course she was right. Mothers most often are, and I had allowed too much blood and thunder into me. 

“You have the salve of healing in your veins,” she told me later when we were alone. “You should learn to use it as often as you would use the forge

“Terra especially will need your magic all too soon. Her birthing will not be an easy one. Think less about fighting the Fereldens and more about caring for your own. You will ease that child's passage into this world—the Maker knows that they will have a hard enough life ahead of them once they are here.”


	13. 14 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

Yesterday was as dry as we had hoped for, and we were able to spend a few precious hours drying out the tent and our clothing—gathered around the tiny fire that we were brazen enough to build from kindling in Tristrum's pack. 

The darkspawn grow nearer, and now that it is stiller I can hear the echoes of their horror upon the night. 

And yet, we are in good spirits, and have covered some five miles or more. I have finally managed to work with a little lyrium, and have been able to ease the grief that the wound in Tristrum's leg is causing him. It is still far from being healed, but I am certain that with a little more strength and practise I should be able to cure him of it. 

I had not thought of it before, but it has been over a year since I worked any kind of magic at all. It feels strange to do so again, unfamiliar and yet utterly welcome. 

We are both aware of the danger that we continue to be in every day that we spend out here. We cannot drive ourselves to our deaths, but neither can we afford to rest while the darkspawn hoard descends upon us.


	14. 15 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I found out about my mother's death the morning after Terra gave birth to Astarte. I had left Rye's house at the first sliver of winter light, and cracked the ice on the water trough outside to wash the blood off of my hands. 

Rye was exhausted, but smiling, as he embraced me, and as I walked down the silent road towards the workshop, I could see my breath hanging still and silent in the air. 

It was one of those bright winter mornings, and though I had not slept, I pushed the weariness away with the audacity of youth and threw myself into my work. There was a kind of rhythm in it: The sweat upon my back; hot metal in my hands; the shouts of the other men and the hiss of quenching steel; the solidity of hewn wood against my shoulder as we heaved the wheels into place. Soot in my eyes and in my hair. Splinters in my hands. 

That morning, I remember the bruises on my forearms as I worked: The legacy of a labour strike the week before that had turned nasty when the city guard were called in to break us up. It was those same protests that had sent my mother north to Hinter to speak with the arl. When Toby, her apprentice, came into the workshop alone, I knew that there was something wrong. I could feel it in my blood. 

He told me everything he knew: That the city guards had woken him in the middle of the night, and they had told him that my mother was dead. That she had been set upon by mercenaries and murdered. He had ridden back to the Crossing at full gallop to find me, and I wasted none in retracing his steps back to the city. I knew that Rye would have ridden with me—but I did not ask.

I reached Hinter a few ours after nightfall, and was forced to wait until the morning to see my mother's body. She had been badly beaten, and I stood beside her for an eternity, with no idea of what I would do now. Rage and frustration found a home in me. 

And grief. Of course there was grief. But more than anything I quenched myself in the need to hunt down whoever had done this to her, and make them pay in kind. 

It took some time for the rational part of my mind to recover and begin arguing that I would get myself killed if I tried. The guards and healers at the Chantry where they had left her body were worse than useless to me. None of them could explain to me how an armed woman with little worth taking could be murdered in the middle of her own city, amongst her own people. 

I stood over her beaten corpse, and I dug my nails into my palms until my hands were burning. I don't know what would have happened to me if he hadn't found me there. Given me a reason to keep fighting. Perhaps I would have found no reason at all. 

“Are you her son?”

The voice was far closer than I would have liked. 

“I saw what happened,” it said. “Everything.”

There was something strange about that voice—as though it had been sharpened with a whetstone until everything he said sounded like a threat. He had eyes that matched it, too. A raging storm above green water. Long, tapering ears, and untidy black hair. 

We rarely saw elves at all as far south as the Crossing. I had always been struck by the intensity of their eyes. 

I pushed my thumbs into the belt of my travelling leathers, and took a step towards him.

“Who are you?”

“Nobody,” he said, and shrugged. “Just another elf out of the alienage.”

And, when I just stared at him, he added: 

“Morgan.”

He nodded to my mother's body. 

“I knew that someone would come for her,” he said. “She didn't go down easy, and it seemed logical that anyone she knew would probably be the same. No one would tell me where they had taken the body. It has taken me a long time to find you here.”

I flexed my aching fingers, and said:

“Just tell me what you saw, elf.”

He held my gaze. Cooley and steadily. 

“First tell me your name, stranger.”

I faced him down for a long moment before I could talk the homicidal part of my mind down from strangling him where he stood. 

“Will.”

Morgan nodded. 

His eyes were fathomless. 

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said without a trace of emotion. “But what I have to tell you will not comfort you. The men that killed your mother, they were mercenaries. Mercenaries in the direct employment of the city guard. Of the arl himself.”

The joints of my fingers creaked as I formed my hands into fists at my sides. 

“I need to know everything,” I threatened him. “Now.”

Morgan shrugged and kept staring at the candles placed around my mother's body as though he was no more afraid of me than he was frightened by the rain crackling against the Chantry windows.   
“I've seen them before,” he said. “Every elf in the alienage has seen them. We know who they are, what they do, and who they work for. We have drawn their wrath on ourselves enough.”

A sort of fever was descending over me, intertwined with the sound of the rain against the windows.   
“We must take this news to Denerim,” I said, closing him down. “The Landsmeet should know what Estraven is doing here. The _king_ should know what has been done.”

Morgan made a tired, dismissive sound at the back of his throat. 

“And who are they going to listen to?” he asked me. “You? The grieving son with a head full of rage and a sharpened knife in your boot? Or maybe they would rather listen to another of the filthy knife ears from the alienage.”

He sighed as though I was tiring him, and looked back at the candles. 

“It won't help, Will,” he told me. “They won't listen.”

I bit down on my tongue until my jaw ached. He was right. Of course he was right, and somewhere inside of myself, I knew it. 

“And what do you want, Morgan?”

I was standing over him now, threatening him with my voice, but the whole time he just stared up at me. Impassive. Utterly unafraid. 

“Why did you go to all the trouble of finding me? Do you expect me to be grateful for what you've told me? Do you expect me to pay?”

He spat onto the floor of the Chantry and stepped into me. His upper lip quivered with a mixture of rage and disdain, and there was enough fight and thunder in his eyes to give Rye some competition.   
“I came here,” he said, his voice shaking with anger. “Because I thought that you would want to know. Because I would want to know.”

He was almost a full head shorter than me, but there was something about him—something dangerous, something almost unhinged—that would have given me pause if I had not been so knotted up with bile and tears.

“Enjoy your grief, Malik,” he said, turning away from me and walking towards the door. “Try not to choke on it.”

“Wait.”

He stopped halfway between the candles and the darkness of the chapel door, although he did not speak, and he did not look back at me. 

I held up my hands, and suffocated myself on an apology for several seconds before I realised that I could not make it heard. 

“I'm...” I struggled a little longer, and then gave up. “How did you know my name? My birth name?”

This time, he did look back at me.

“Because it was the same as hers,” he said. “Because in the day and a half that I've been looking for her, I have heard a lot of people in the alienage speak the name of Malik. Because the elves in the alienage hate Estraven as much as the Ascellan do.”

He nodded towards my mother's body. 

“And because her death was as much our loss as theirs.”

To this day, I don't know where the thought that leapt into my head in that instant came from. Only that one moment I was lost and desperate, cut adrift in a storm of hate and rage, and the next all of that faded beneath the absolute certainty of what I must do next. 

“Take me to them,” I said. “These elves that hate Estraven as much as I do. Bring me to them.”

Morgan laughed. It was a cold, angry sound that had slowly and methodically been stripped of every shred of warmth or joy. 

“What makes you think that they would want to see you, human?”

I looked down at my mother's body, and fought the urge to reach out and touch the blue-black of her cheek. 

“Because we have something in common,” I told him. “Because we all find an enemy in the same man, and so perhaps it's time that we began to talk.”

He assessed me for a long time, and I could see the instant that he decided to take me with him reflected in the storm-green of his eyes. 

“Bring your cloak,” he told me, stepping into the shadows that swamped the chapel door. “The weather is getting worse.”


	15. 16 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

The anger that had haunted me in the hours that I had stood over my mother's broken body did not stay with her in that chapel as we left. It preyed upon me with a malicious kind of hunger that forced me to give myself over to it time and time again. 

Talking to the elves in that alienage, I felt as though I was outside myself. As though the doors had been sealed against me and I would never get back inside my skin again. I did not emerge from those tired, filthy-looking houses with an army ready and willing to fight an arl. We agreed only that we would keep talking, and in my grief it seemed as though I had achieved nothing at all. 

“I will come back with you,” Morgan told me as we stepped back out into the rain. 

The vhenadahl was hung with dozens of cautious flames in tiny glass lanterns. They hung like stars suspended in the downpour. I pulled up the hood of my cloak, and stared at it through the rain. 

“Will,” he said again. “I said I shall come back with you.”

The rain crackled against the leather of my hood and dripped down onto the cobbles. 

“And why would you want to do that?”

I finally managed to glance across at him, and found him staring up into the branches with a wild, calculating intelligence stirring somewhere just beneath the surface. 

“Because you need someone to act as a go-between for the elves and the Ascellan,” he said. “Because I need to get out of here.”

I don't know whether he intended me to hear that second part, because he spoke it so quietly that it was all but swallowed by the rain. 

I said, “Can you take me to the place where it happened? To the place where my mother was murdered?”

He nodded as though he understood exactly, although I was certain there was no way that he could.  
“I can,” he said. “Come on.”

We walked without speaking another word, and when he stopped in a narrow canyon between two leaning buildings, I sat down on the rain-soaked cobbles and let my mind drift into the Fade. 

There were so many memories of blood and death beyond the Veil that I found it hard to grasp the thread that led me back to her again. And, when I did, it was Rage that was waiting there in the falling rain for me.

I recognised the spirit for what it was immediately, but it wore my mother's face, and its pleading and tempestuous demands for vengeance found purchase inside me—like a thorn catching in my soul. 

Morgan was still waiting when I crawled back out of the Fade and barely even seemed to notice that I had been working magic, and so I took him away from his wife and from his sister, and he took me away from the whisperings of the thing that wore my mother's face and screamed at me for bloody murder. He did not speak one word on the ride back from Hinter, but neither did he need to. The knowledge of his presence kept me safe from the best parts of myself. 

By the time we reached the Crossing, the arl's men had seized my mother's cabin, and it was only Rye's quick-thinking that had kept my father's library and my mother's letters and diaries out of their hands. 

I moved in with them then—with Rye and Terra—because I had nowhere else to go, and over the next few years Morgan was an intermittent presence there, as well: Alternating between the alienage in Hinter and the hearth of the cottage that had been in Terra's family for seven generations, where he would stretch out on the settle and sleep as soundly as the dogs.


	16. 17 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

The memories of the time that I spent in that house are without a doubt the happiest of all those that I have gathered together in my life. Rye and Terra loved one another deeply, and I loved the life that the two of them shared together—as you love something that you know that you can never have. 

In those few short years that we spent at the Crossing, I moved into the space amongst the Ascellan workers that had been left behind after my mother's death. I did it without thinking, and with the same fearsome certainty that had seized me in that moment as I stood over her body. I met with the leaders of the leaders of the work gangs, the bosses of Ascellan mercenary companies, and the criminal gangs operating out of Hinter. I rode north to midnight meetings in the alienage, and with time and Morgan's unfailing assistance, I slowly gained the trust of the elves that lived there.

Year on year, famine and hardship came to find us in the Crossing, and year by year the methods which we employed to fight it became more desperate. We were neither strong nor brazen enough to operate openly. Instead, we listened. We built trust and co-dependence with the men and women that fought and worked and thieved in Highmoor. We made gold-lined brushland cloaks out of black, supple leather as our ancestors had done, fastened them with sprigs of whinflower and drew up the hoods to hide our faces. We came like wolves in the night to threaten anyone that would not cooperate with us. We drew up lists of the worst of the Fereldens that ruled over us, and began to arrange unfortunate accidents for them. 

Arl Estraven was always out of our reach. Any pretence of relations between the Ascellan and our Ferelden rulers had ended with my mother's death. Sometimes, we would feel as though we were making progress. At others, the arl would clamp down around us like a bear trap. 

We used what strengths we had: Our ability to work metal and stockpile weapons under the banner of industry; the network of houses and rooftops around the alienage that provided bolt-holes and safe-houses around the capital; our profound understanding of the barren moors that stretched as far north as the Korcari Wilds. 

We gathered together the men, women and elves that hated Arl Estraven the most, and organised them into columns. We took them out onto the moors, and onto the rooftops of the city. We taught them how to fight. How to tell a Ferelden trading caravan—or a supply convoy of the arl's own men—from our own people from half a mile away, and how to take what we needed from our enemies without getting each other killed. 

In the tiny villages and way-stations along the high roads, they would see us ride out at twilight in groups of five or ten with our brushland cloaks drawn up against the rain in the failing, silver light.   
They began to call us the Hood of the Moors.

A year or so after my mother's death Terra fell pregnant again, and at the height of the summer striking season she gave birth to a little boy that she and Rye named Will. I loved both of their children as I would have loved my own, and no matter how terrible things got, Rye was always coming home from a meeting at the forge to find me in front of the fire with the children. 

I worked at the cartwright's for as long as I could, and when it became impossible, I wrote missives—in between the talks and the planning and the raids. Morgan secured the assistance of a dozen elves in the alienage to do the copywork, and within a year we made sure our words were read on every workshop floor in the northern Hinterlands. 

And yet, it made little difference to us. 

No matter how many copies we could make, or how many merchants we could convince to smuggle them out of Highmoor, what did the rest of Ferelden care for the hardship of a swathe of elves and unwashed savages that they had never heard of? Our pamphlets stopped flowing long before they reached the eyes and hands of anyone who could do something about what was happening to us. The bans and arls, the nobles and the high-born of Denerim, remained always just beyond our reach. 

And in my silent moments, Rage would whisper to me. 

Tell me that nothing that we had done would be enough. That we had made no difference at all.

Our lives were busy. 

So busy that I did not notice Morgan falling in love with me. 

That I did not notice as I let him. 

Not until one afternoon when we were alone and arguing (for we often argued ferociously over any point on which we could not agree). Sometimes, we would do more than argue, but this time he did not hit me when he slammed me back against the wall—he kissed me. 

I took hold of his shoulders. I am certain that I meant to push him away, but instead I found myself pinning him in my place. I still remember the heat of his body against mine and how tightly his fingers dug into my hair. The sound of voices outside as Rye and Terra came up the path. 

“I'm not finished with you,” I told him, although I did not recognise that voice, or whatever place inside of me that it came from. 

His breath was like a summer wind against my cheek and in my hair. 

“Stay the latch on your door tonight,” he said into my ear, and drew away. 

He pushed past Rye before the door was even fully open, and was swallowed by the sunlight.   
That night, I stood with my hand on that latch for an eternity—willing my fingers to fasten it. Eventually, I gave up trying and went to my desk to write out some of the fugue that had settled in my brain. The words didn't come. They resisted me for hours, and when the candle had burned down to nothing, I went to bed. 

I don't know what time it was when I woke to the sound of my name on that cool, still night. Late enough that it took a long time for my head to clear. For me to realise who it was that called me.   
His hand slid down my side, underneath the sheets—fingers pressed deep into the flesh. 

“Morgan?”

I twisted my head to look at him over my shoulder, at the outline of him against the blue-black night. His fingers passed over my chest like silk, digging in underneath my jaw and turning my head towards him until his mouth was over mine. 

I argued hard with myself to stop him, but instead I turned clumsily into him and drew his body against mine. 

We made love all through that night. Until the sun rose over the moors. I was not gentle with him, and although he snarled and struggled against me, he never once asked me to stop.


	17. 18 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I have never really told anyone about the relationship that I pursued with Morgan over the years that followed that night. Have never admitted to anyone how completely that I loved him. Now, then, seems like a good time to be doing it. There is a darkness in the air that gets into the blood, and I don't know how much longer we are going to be able to survive out here. How much longer we will be able to outrun the Blight. 

In the beginning, I told myself that I was protecting Morgan by keeping our relationship a secret. Protecting him from becoming more of a target than he already was. 

And, after what he did to us, I suppose that I have spent the years since trying to convince myself that I never loved him at all. 

It never works. 

The memory of him is always there waiting for me at the end of the day. 

It seeps into me like blood seeps into cloth. 

Rye and Terra knew about us, of course. How could they not? But even then it was never something that I spoke about out loud. I can only assume that Rye must either understand my reasoning, or believe that it is none of his business. 

I know that Morgan envied them—Rye and Terra—envied the life that they had with one another. In my own way, I suppose that I did too. I still must. Why else would Morgan haunt every moment in which I hang between sleeping and waking? 

Maybe his envy was part of the reason that he did what he did. 

Maybe things would have been different if I had instead allowed him to become a target for all the people that wished me dead. Maybe I would have just gotten him killed. 

I almost want to believe that it would have been easier like that. 

It doesn't matter. 

The only thing that matters is that I had met in him the one soul that I was meant to spend the rest of my mortal life with, and now he is gone forever. 

That needed to be said, at last.


	18. 19 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

These last few days, there has been an almost imperceptible change in Tristrum and I both. I have not wanted to mention it, almost for fear that I would shatter it entirely, but there is no sense denying it any longer: We are both growing stronger. 

I have been able to heal the injury to Tristrum's leg almost entirely now, which has meant that I have had the strength and steel of a templar to bolster my own over the last two days. Slowly, my body is beginning to recover. I can eat a little solid food now, and my muscles burn less when we walk. 

For the first time this morning, I rose and took a deep breath of the morning air and tasted freedom in it. The sunlight that dappled the brown-grey moor, and the speeding patchwork of blue and raincloud-grey above us is more beautiful than anything I have ever seen. 

Ten years in that Tower. The last twelve months of it locked in a cold, lightless stone cell. Now, as my strength returns, I am slowly breaking free of it.

Now I understand how the dwarves feel, when they emerge from Orzammar for the first time.   
I feel as though I could fall into the sky.


	19. 20 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

The longer that the Hood of the Moors operated out of Cirsa's Crossing, the more difficult that it became. By now, half of the arling was looking for us. The city guardsmen had started coming all the way from Hinter to arrest those that they suspected of belonging to the resistance. Many of our best men and women had been lost to them. We never heard from them again. 

By 9:15 Dragon there had already been two attempts on my life, and at least one on Morgan's and Rye's. I had been arrested more than once over the pamphlets that were circulating in the workshops of the Hinterlands. They couldn't yet prove that I was actively participating in the raids on their supply lines, but it wouldn't be long before they decided that they didn't need to.

With all our lives... with the _childrens_ ' lives in danger, it was obvious that we must leave the Crossing. That we must seek to disappear. To begin with, we chose the crowded slums of Hinter itself to conceal us—moving like shadows right underneath Arl Estraven's nose. 

We began recruiting in earnest. Making alliances with the Ascellan gangs that plagued the streets and speaking with anyone who was as angry with Ferelden rule as we were. We no longer made our money honestly. Instead, we paid our way as highwaymen, petty criminals and smugglers. Over the summer, we camped out on the moors for months at a time when the guards grew to close for comfort. We sought out the ruined castle at Whinbarrow that had been built by the Ascellan during the days that they fought with the Imperium, and made its crumbling, roofless walls our home. We lived amongst the ivy and the overgrowth, and lit fires in the centre of the tower that warmed the stone for the first time since the days untold. 

In winter, we sheltered in the cellars and attics of the poorest houses in the city, and blended in amidst the filth and desperation. 

It was around then that I found Zara. She was a fierce warrior and strategist of the finest Chasind tradition. Within two months, she was my strong arm. She reminded me of Callista: Smart, strong and cunning. She could best the meanest Ascellan blacksmith in a straight-up brawl. 

With Zara's sword always within reach, we managed to organise and train columns of warriors all across the arling. We became a force to be reckoned with—never enough to take on the city guard in its full force, but they had begun to think more carefully about how they could hunt us down. 

As you could well imagine, Arl Estraven was not happy. With every year the bounty on our heads increased. But, for a few brief moments we felt the touch of something that none of us had ever held before—we felt the touch of power. The taste of freedom in the wind.

We felt like gods. 

In the silent moments before we fell asleep, we all knew that it would not be enough to fight a civil war against King Maric—against the entirety of the Ferelden army—but we had begun to allow ourselves to hope that it would lead us into something better. Something more.

I kept writing, but time and time again our words would fall short of reaching the ears of the nobles who could help us, and Rage still whispered to me with my mother's voice at night with Morgan sound asleep beside me. 

Slowly, I began to convince myself that I knew exactly what it would take to turn the tide against Arl Estraven. To bring the words of protest and despair to the ears of the Landsmeet—to the ears of the king. 

It would certainly take more than the word of a near-nameless Chasind criminal. It would require the whole of Ferelden to be shaken by something terrible. Something unspeakable. Then, perhaps, they would begin to question why such a thing could possibly have happened. Then they would look upon the man who had committed such an atrocity, and begin to ask what had driven him to it.

The fire in my heart over those weeks and months was like the furnace in a forge. 

Rye never told me how he managed to get the explosives from the Qunari.


	20. 21 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

“You are thinking about the past, Will.”

Morgan's voice comes to me low and harsh through the fabric of the Fade. But then, he never did learn how to sound kind or gentle when he spoke. 

“That isn't like you.”

I am standing in my mother's cabin. Looking out across the moors. The only sound in all the world is the relentless tapping of rain upon the wooden roof. It traces silver paths over the glass, and I ghost their journeys with my fingers. 

Morgan is standing somewhere behind me. I can feel tears on my cheeks, and I wrap my arms around myself. His boots make muted sounds against the floorboards as he comes closer. 

The rain keeps ticking on the glass. 

His body is warm against my back. 

“Do you still hate me, Will?”

I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. I haven't cried in many years. 

I still haven't. 

Because none of this is real. 

“ _Will_?”

His breath stirs the hairs on the back of my neck. Everything feel so vivid. So real. A dream that you could fall into forever. A thousand leagues away from the long, miserable trek across the moors.   
His fingers breathe against the curve of my neck. 

“I love you,” he says. 

My heart is turning brittle and jagged somewhere between my lungs. I do my best to fight the urge to hold him, and hug myself a little tighter instead. 

“What do you want from me?” I ask him—or rather, I ask the spirit that's somewhere behind the green of his eyes and the ghost of his breath on my skin. 

His lips touch just behind my ear, as warm as the glow of a bonfire. 

“Do you still hate me, Will?”

I open up my eyes, and watch the grey rain streaking down the glass. 

“Yes,” I tell him. 

I shiver as the tips of his fingers run carefully over my shoulders and down my arms. I don't see the smile that quirks the corner of his mouth, but I can hear it in his voice. 

“No you don't,” he tells me. 

The palm of his open hand slides across my stomach, and I listen to his breathing. 

“You hate yourself,” he says. 

I bite down on the jagged feeling in my chest, and say nothing at all. His chest rises and falls slowly and steadily against my shoulder blades. 

“I need you to know something, Will,” he tells me, and then he says: “I forgive you.”

* * *

I woke from that dream still struggling for breath. 

Outside the tent, the thunder rolled—a low, unending sound that flowed like water out across the moor. 

And then the heavens opened, and a hundred thousand drops of winter rain clicked and scratched against the canvas. 

I was alone, and dressed quickly to find Tristrum outside—the storm glancing and pinging off the mirror-silver metal of his armour. He held the telescope steadily, and as I came up behind him he handed it over to me without a word. Through the eyepiece, I scanned the rolling mountains that stretched out towards the Wilds, then followed the pale line of the Imperial Highway like a thread laid across the rough until I saw the darkspawn horde. 

They were still miles off of our position, heading southwards towards Lothering, but it was the first time that either of us had actually seen them for ourselves. 

It was enough to turn our blood to rainwater. 

The horde looked something like a shadow, and something like an insanity of crawling horrors scrabbling north across the Hinterlands. 

I folded the telescope away, and for the longest moment, Tristrum and I simply stood and stared into the distance. 

We are still more than a week's walk south of Hinter. 

All of Highmoor must be overrun. 

Tristrum turned away, looking west towards the Frostback Mountains. The rain was dripping through his short, fair hair and running in streams over his cheeks and down his neck. 

“Will,” he said. “Perhaps...”

“No,” I tell him roughly. “We go south.”

“But if the horde is already so far north-” 

“I am going south, Tristrum!” He had not heard me raise my voice before, and I surprised him with it. “You may do as you wish.”

For almost a full five minutes, neither of us spoke.

I listened to the rain falling on his armour. 

I needed him, of course. Without him I will be dead long before we reach the Crossing, and he knew it. 

Tristrum sighed, and turned away. 

“I'll go and break camp,” he said. “If we are going to find anyone alive down there, then we shall have to move quickly.”

* * *

Rye never told me how he managed to get hold of Qunari black powder, and I never asked. 

He had been my friend for long enough that I had learned to let him do his job. 

It was not difficult to gain access to Arl Estraven's keep in the weeks before the Funalis—which in Highmoor had always been our gale day. Many of the arl's servants were Ascellan or elven men and women whom we had grown to know well, and who were easily talked into turning a blind eye to our comings and goings. 

Morgan was never happy with what we were to do. Our plans would place us all at risk, but Morgan knew full well that even if we succeeded beyond our wildest hopes, then I would most likely be executed for what we had done. He had never joined with us to sacrifice his life for the overthrow of Ferelden rule. All Morgan wanted was to live as far from oppression as he could get. 

I knew how he felt about it all—but I was in no mood to entertain his protests. Every sinew in my body was on fire. I did not eat, barely slept, and withdrew into myself. Looking back on it now, I suppose it was a defence against what I was about to do. Either way, eventually Morgan stopped arguing with me about it. In truth, I think we stopped talking at all. 

At the time, we were sleeping in the attic rooms of a house near the alienage. The beams were ridden with woodworm, and the cold always clawed its way in through windows that never shut properly, but at night the moonlight would pour in over the rooftops and we would huddle close together in the blue-silver of its light. 

The night before the attack, the silence between us finally began to break. 

It would most likely to be the last time I ever saw the one person in the world that I loved with all my heart. I was a man preparing for my death, and I did not want to face it knowing that he hated me. 

I was too selfish to stand it. 

“What would you like to do?” I asked him in the quiet of the moonlight. “If we didn't have to live like this, what would you do now?”

He lay with his head on my shoulder for a very long time, and I ran my fingers through the fine, slick, black darkness of his hair. He drew a breath, his voice low and dark and tempestuous in the moonlight. 

“I would make you come back with me to the Crossing. Maybe we could rebuild your mother's cabin up on the moors above the town.”

A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. 

“Is that it?”

Morgan shrugged. 

“To begin with,” he said. “It's enough.”

I tilted my head back enough to look out of the dirty, chequered glass at the rich, deep blue of the sky. The moon was so bright that it hurt my eyes. I ran my hand down between his shoulder blades. 

“I don't want to have to do this to you, Morgan,” I told him. 

He twisted around in my arms until he was looking up at me. Even in the monochrome of night-time his eyes glistened the most brilliant green. 

“Then don't. Leave with me, Will. Come back to the Crossing. Fall asleep with me out on the moors again.”

I gritted my teeth an little and closed my eyes against it all. 

“You know that I can't do that.”

“No,” he said coldly. “I know that you _won't_.”

For the longest time, neither of us spoke. Outside the window, life in the alienage went by as it always has done underneath the mantle of darkness. 

Eventually, Morgan said: “There are other ways to do this, Will.”

I drew away from him, flattening my back against the cool plaster of the wall and pushing my fingers through my hair. 

“Are there? Then tell me what they are, Morgan. Tell me what we can do that we have not already done, and I will do it.”

“I have tried telling you, Will,” he said. “You have never listened to a single word of it.”

He sat forwards, and wrapped his arms around his legs. 

I couldn't argue with him. Maybe because I didn't want to, or maybe because I knew that he was right. We had gone to far along this path now. I wasn't sure that I could turn back even if I wanted to. 

“Morgan...”

He shook his head, and twisted around to look out of the window and down into the alienage. 

“Don't, Will,” he said. “Just... Just tell me where you intend to send Terra and the others when it happens.”

Rye and I had organised it all weeks ago. Down to the smallest detail. Even before the explosives went off, two carriages would leave Hinter carrying the people that we wanted to protect away from all of this. They would hide out in one of the villages on the edges of the Korcari Wilds until the guards stopped looking for anyone that they could connect to us.

I studied his profile in the moonlight. 

“Why?”

His eyes flashed over me like vitriol. 

“Because I am going to lose the man I love tomorrow no matter what I want, and I will not let you take my sister... and my wife... away from me as well.”

I knew even then that I shouldn't have told him. That the plan was to keep it as a perfect secret. That only Rye and I could know about what would happen to the people we cared about when I was gone, and that when the storm had passed, he would make sure that they were cared for. That he would see them returned to Hinter as soon as it was safe for them. 

But I was so desperately lonely that night. 

All I wanted in the world was to lie down with him, to make love to him, and feel his fingers on my skin and in my hair. I was a man prepared for death, and everything else just seemed incidental to me now—like dust motes swimming in the summer sun. 

And so I told him. I told him, and he kissed me and pushed the flat of his hand up the back of my neck and made love with me until the blue-silver of the night melted into the apricot glow of morning. 

By the time that Rye woke me, Morgan had already left and melted back into the city. 

I thanked every blessing that I had for it.

I did not want to say goodbye.


	21. 22 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

It was never meant to end the way it did. 

They were meant to live on the edges of the wilds and disappear. 

Everybody was. 

Everyone but me.

* * *

The morning of Funalis, it was raining. 

Gale day. The day on which the yearly tithes were due, and every Ferelden land owner and workshop overseer in Highmoor came to Arl Estraven to pay their way and return him as our master. They brought enough Ascellan and elven servants with them to fill every inn across the city. We knew that it would get messy, that it would be painful, but none of us could have anticipated what would happen next.

On that grey morning, Rye, Zara and I slipped through the rainswept streets to light the fuses. We moved wordlessly, and as silently as ghosts in our brushland cloaks, but nevertheless, Arl Estravan's knights were waiting there for us. 

The battle was bloody and desperate. 

Zara fought like a dragon. She was like a sister to me, and I kept her on her feet and fighting with my magic for a long time before they overwhelmed her. 

But I could not stop the tide for her. They cut her down, and I still remember the sound of her voice as she was swamped beneath their blades: 

“Gwillym... Gwillym, run! You must light the fuses, Will!”

The light was silver on their armour. On her sword as her arms trembled with the strain of holding them off. Rye took me by the shoulder...

And we ran. 

If I believed in the Orlesian myth of the Maker, or in any of the false Ascellan gods of the old world, I would have prayed to them for her. I would have prayed, at least, that they wanted to take her alive. 

That tomorrow we would start to plan how we would get her out. 

By the time we found the charges, Estraven's guardsmen had already removed almost a third of them, and I watched as Rye murdered those poor people. 

I lit the charges. 

Then we fled out into the rain. 

We were barely clear of the keep when the explosives caught, and Arl Estraven's entire world came thundering down on top of him and every Ferelden doglord that paid fealty to him. 

We were thrown onto the cobbles—our hands grazed, deaf and dumb from the explosion. I couldn't think straight. Couldn't make sense of it all, and must have stood there for almost quarter of an hour watching the bloody, dying people stumble through the fog of dust among the ruins. 

The first thing I heard when I began to regain my senses was the screaming. I had forgotten Rye had even been with me, and when he finally found me he had to all but drag me away.

Somehow, he got me across the city and to the meeting point.

There were meant to be four of us there—on the rooftops of the alienage amongst the clustered chimneys and the birds' nests. But, as we struggled up the ladder and kicked it loose so that no one else could follow, we found that we were alone up there. 

We didn't know what the arl's men had done with Zara. And I had no idea where Morgan was.   
It was nightfall above that devastated city by the time we heard the arl was dead, and that Zara had been executed for high treason. It was almost morning when we heard that the coaches that had been taking our loved ones away from Hinter had been ransacked by Estraven's knights out on the Road of Bones. 

That Terra and the children were dead. 

It is the only time in all the years that I've known Rye that I have seen him cry—violent, angry tears that didn't stop for almost an hour after I restrained him and held him in the sunrise-shadow of the alienage chimneys. We sat for many hours after that in grey silence. Pale and speechless. In the full knowledge that we had both been betrayed. 

I had no choice but to admit to Rye what I had told Morgan about the coach that had been carrying his wife and children away. I half expected him to murder me as he had murdered Estraven's poor servants underneath the keep. 

I think I wanted him to do it. 

I deserved to die for what I had done to him.

Instead, he put his boot on the sack-wrapped crossbow at his feet and kicked it across the tiles to me. 

“Where is he?” he said. 

I stared down at the dull points of the bolts protruding through the canvas. 

“I don't know,” I said, and then: “We'll find him.”


	22. 23 Firsfall 9:30 Dragon

It was too dangerous for us to risk going out into the city during the day. Hinter was in turmoil, and Estraven's guards and knights were scouring every inch of the place looking for us. They knew me by name, and knew who had given us shelter. It didn't matter, most of the people that had protected us had been on that cart with Terra. Most of them were dead, and Hinter was becoming a hostile landscape. 

And so we waited in silence until nightfall, and then Rye and I slipped through the city like water—moving from darkness to darkness amidst the ruins and the rubble. 

The two elves who had helped to keep us hidden on the rooftop told us that word had already been sent north to King Maric. It was only a matter of time before his men began to come south towards us. There were protests, riots even, starting in Hinter and then radiating outwards into the countryside in a wave of blood and fire. 

Hinter was a city under siege from within, and we heard the fighting as we slipped silently from street to street.

We had no idea of Morgan was even still in the city, but if he was, then I knew all of the places that he would try and hide. 

It was almost midnight by the time we found him, and he ran. 

He ran as soon as he saw us, and we gave chase through the city as it tore itself apart. It took us twenty minutes to run him down. With all the death that I had seen that day, I had almost forgotten who it was that Rye and I were about to kill now a narrow street beside the roaring river. I had given myself up simply to the chase.

The lyrium roared inside of me like the coming of a storm, and I gave myself over to it.

Morgan had almost reached the end of the street by the time he realised we had him cornered. He flattered back against the wall amongst the crates and barrels and stared at us with bared teeth—a trapped animal that was ready to run or fight on a hair-trigger. 

Rye drew his knives from his belt. I could hear the metal on the leather even over the roar of the water. I raised my hand to stop him. I did not look back, and it felt like an eternity before I heard the blades slide back into their scabbards. 

Morgan's shoulders slackened a little. As though he had been holding his breath.

I drew my crossbow. 

“What have you done, Morgan?”

He had the look, in those fathomless eyes, of a man who was going to fight me to the death with his fingernails, if he had to. 

“What did you expect me to do, Will?” He snarled through gritted teeth. “You have lost your mind to the poison that man pours into your ear. You have not listened to me. For months. You would not listen to me, Will!”

I bit down on a feeling I wasn't sure that I could name, and took a step towards him. 

“And so you thought that you would give us up to Estraven? Morgan, what have you spent the last fifteen years of your life fighting for?”

“They were going to let you go!” His voice was almost a scream now. “The captain of the guard promised me that if I would help her to stop this, then you would be imprisoned for ten... maybe fifteen years... I would have waited for you, Will. 

“I wasn't stupid!” he spat. “I didn't tell them everything. I knew that they would try and have you executed anyway, but you are as sharp as a knife, Gwillym. You always have been. When you found out that the arl knew about our plans... You would have had the chance to get away. Then we could have left the Hinterlands together. Found another life. A better one. Why didn't you run, Will? Why do you never run?!”

“You have betrayed me, Morgan!” I was shouting now, and could hear the fractures in my voice. “You have betrayed us all!”

The lyrium singing in my ears like struck steel.

“Zara is dead because of what you've done! Terra and the children are... Maker, Morgan, even you're own sister. You're wife!”

“You think that I don't know that?” His narrowed eyes burned into me like acid. “You think I care? Do you think I ever cared? About any of them?”

The river was in full spate, everything indistinct beneath the thunderous rupturing of water. 

He stepped towards me. His chest almost touching the bolt of my crossbow. 

“Only you, Will,” he said. “It has only ever been about you, and you know it. When you stopped arguing with me, you knew what I would do. Of course you did.”

He stared me in the eyes, and I could see right into the very bottom of his soul. Morgan was not afraid. He did not think that I would do it, even now. 

“I love you, Will.”

I did not look at Rye, but I could feel the pressure of his eyes on me. 

I closed my eyes, and breathed, and remembered all those stolen hours in cramped and unmade beds. 

I pulled the trigger, and Morgan's body jolted backwards with the impact, throwing him back against the wall. The blood vented out of the hole in his crushed chest, and he reached out his hand for mine. 

I stared at him, and did not move.

When he was dead, we threw his body in the river. 

By the morning, I had turned myself in to the city guard. 

And I have not spoken to Rye since that night.


	23. 24 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

We can smell the darkspawn on the wind. The stench of filth and death and sickness that they bring upon the land. The moorland around us has started to change—turning grey and dying with their Taint, under the first dustings of winter snow that settle like chalk dust upon the earth. 

We have spent the last two hours charting the locations of the darkspawn we have seen and guessed at over the last few days, and attempting to navigate a path around them. 

Tristrum has not mentioned our heading again, and I worry that he has begun to give up hope.

Maybe I have just been thinking too much about my Morgan. 

I do not know what I will do if Tristrum decides to head west. 

I have tried not to think about it. 

Our food and water are running low, and every stream we pass runs yellow with the Blight. 

We have had to cut our rations. 

I do not believe in miracles, but I know that we will need one.


	24. 25 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I may not know what Rye thought of me after the Funalis Massacre, but I do know that he did his job. 

The letters I had written to every guild and union leader in the arling went where they were meant to, as did the ones addressed to the bans of the surrounding countryside, and every major arl and teryn, all the way up to King Maric himself. 

There was a very real risk that, when they caught me, Arl Estraven's men would panic and kill me on sight—or else have me executed as they had done with Zara. 

A call upon the elves and Ascellan workers of the arling, enough to create the real and genuine threat of civil war, was the only insurance I could take out against that happening. After all, we needed my trial to be as public as possible if we were going to be heard. 

And the letters to the nobility were my best chance of reaching them should that trial be denied to me. 

The next morning, the entire arling was in turmoil, and I sat in the dungeon cell where they had beaten and chained me—and I waited. 

For days, I barely moved, and saw no one at all. 

And then Teyrn Loghain—Maric's most valued counsel—came calling for me. 

As he came into my cell, I stood up so that I was eye-to-eye with him. 

Loghain removed a folded piece of paper from a pocket in his cloak. I did not look at it, but could see that it was in my hand. 

“I see that you have read my letter.”

There was a cunning and an intelligence in Loghain's eyes that I had not anticipated. 

“Let me ask you one thing, Malik,” he said. “You write very well for a man whom my advisers tell me is no better than a barbarian. You are obviously an intelligent man, so perhaps you can explain to me how any of what you have written hear excuses the murder of a man who was responsible for helping to free us all from the poison of Orlesian rule. How it excuses the wholesale murder of your own people.”

I tried to step forwards, but the shackles around my wrists and ankles prevented me. 

“You would not need to ask that if you had spent the last twenty years of _your_ life watching your own people starve in the cold, brutalised by the guards that are meant to protect them, and denied any opportunity to enfranchise themselves.”

Loghain made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 

“Every free man and woman in Ferelden has the right to elect who they owe allegiance to,” he said. “Including the Ascellan.”

“You are mistaken,” I told him. “The landowners have that right. I challenge you to even find a hundred Ascellan men and women out of the twenty thousand that live in this arling who have been allowed that privilege.”

Loghain said nothing.

“Your system may work in the rolling meadows of the Bannorn, teyrn,” I pressed him. “But it is useless here. We are the Forge of Ferelden, and the Ascellan are the minders of that forge. Every one of us must show loyalty to the mine and workshop owners, or they will turn us out of our jobs, and your beloved friend Arl Estraven has made certain that we shall never get a single vote. 

“The workshop owners do not act on behalf of their workers here, Loghain,” I said. “They act only on behalf of themselves, and condemn any Ascellan that dares to disagree with them as nothing better than a savage.”

Loghain was still watching me. Still listening. I kept on talking. It may be the only chance I got.   
“Your system needs reform,” I said. “That is the only way that the Ascellan people may be treated as equals here. The only way in which we may become free men and women.”

Loghain studied me with an avian intelligence. 

“And the violent slaughter of more than two hundred innocent people is the best way of affecting this change, is it?”

“Let me ask you,” I said, and leaned into the stricture of my chains. “How many innocent Orlesians—how many of your own people, even—were killed in the Ferelden uprising?”

A smile pulled at the corner of his narrow lips. 

“King Maric was the legitimately chosen ruler of Ferelden, at war with an occupying force,” he said. “You are waging a campaign of terror against your own people.”

“The Ferelden freemen are _not_ my people. They are an occupying force just as the Orlesians were. They have stolen our land and murdered our children since the days of the Imperium! The only difference between me and King Maric, is that he has the power and a royal lineage which he thinks entitles him to rule, and I have neither. And so I am at his mercy, and at yours.”

He was trying to unpick me. To gauge the measure of my mind, just as I was his. 

“Your people will suffer more because of what you have done,” he said. 

I tried to push my fingers through my hair, but could not reach them higher than my chest. Instead, I laughed at him, although there was little humour in that sound. 

“It is all so much easier when those underneath your boots don't fight back, isn't it?” I said. “Then, when they do fight, you get to call them terrorists and say that they have brought this on themselves.”

Loghain smiled. 

“I shall tell you what I see here, Malik,” he said coolly. “I do not see an uprising of the people, or a desperate plea from the starving. All I see is one man intent on taking a difficult situation and pouring hatred into it. You have not helped your people to pursue a better future, you have filled them up to bursting with rhetoric and loathing, to the point where any peaceful solution is impossible.”

“A peaceful resolution was always impossible!” The words came out louder, and angrier than I had meant them too—my voice striking against the walls like a fist. “You think that I _wanted_ this? This is an act of desperation because your trusted general left us with no other choice!”

“The Maker will judge Estraven for his part in all of this,” said Loghain. “But it is up to me to judge what should be done with you.”

I cooled my temper, but held my ground against him. And I waited. 

“And I shall tell you what I think,” he said. “I think that this is not about your people, Will. I think that this is about you and your own personal crusade against the rest of Ferelden. I think that you have infected enough people with your poison that they will not see reason, that you have hampered any possible peaceful solution at every turn, and that the only way any of this mess gets any better is by ridding Highmoor of the violent terrorists who are determined to solve her problems with her own blood.”

I knew then that he was going to have me executed. 

I said, “This will not end when you have killed me.”

Loghain laughed in the manner of a man who has bested an opponent in combat. 

“You're right,” he said. “It wouldn't. Which is why I shall be damned if I am going to make a martyr out of you, and pour fuel onto the misguided people you have brainwashed into following you.”  
Almost despite myself, my curiosity was beginning to get the better of me. I had not expected to find such a challenge in this man. 

I said, “Then what do you intend to do?”

He gave me a small smile and turned away, and in that moment I realised what it was that I had seen in his eyes. It was not that he knew he was going to kill me, it was that he knew that he had won. 

“I hear a rumour that you are an apostate,” he said as he lingered on the threshold. “And, the last time that I checked, apostate's were not entitled to a public trial in front of all the lords and ladies of the Kingdom.”

He let those words sink into silence, and he nodded to my jailer.

“Take him to the Circle Tower,” he said. “With any luck, the Harrowing Chamber shall solve this problem for me.”


	25. 26 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

I was still wordless in my fury when they dragged me to the Circle Tower and fought me—kicking and cursing and spitting—for the blood in my phylactery. 

For all of our planning, none of us had anticipated that Maric would send me to the Tower. As far as any of us knew, no one beyond my immediate circle even knew I was a mage. Now that I was facing it, it was almost too terrible to comprehend: A towering prison for men and women whose only crime was to be born with abilities that the Chantry considered vile enough to lock them away forever. Stripped of every personal dignity and freedom, and forced into the service of the king whenever there was a war that needed fighting, or a tear in the Fade to close.

The mages in that Tower may have been better fed and clothed than my countrymen and the elves in the alienages, but they had even less control over their own lives than even us. They had no rights, elected no bann to represent them. They could not even leave the Circle Tower, and were watched at all times by the templars, the way a spider watches butterflies. 

It was as close to a nightmare on earth as I could ever have wished for myself. If I had secretly desired punishment for what I had done to Morgan, or for what I had allowed him to do to Rye, then I certainly had it now. 

As soon as they had drawn my blood, they Harrowed me. 

The spirit of Rage that wore my mother's skin came to me, and told that it could give me all the power I would need to get away from this accursed prison. Power enough to take on Maric's army. To gain freedom for my people, and reap a bloody vengeance on all those who dared to stand against me. The whispered offers that the demon made to me in those hours felt like the only escape that I would ever have. 

I passed out of all time, out of all knowing, and for somewhere between a moment and an eternity, I listened to its call.

There was little fight left in me, but Teyrn Loghain had done me a great service—it was only the memory of the silent victory etched into the hard lines of his face that gave me the strength to do what I must do. To convince myself that I would do no good by bringing a demon into the service of the Ascellan people and those who had put their faith in me. 

Regardless of what the demon may be able to give to me, if I were to lose myself in that Harrowing chamber, then the nobles of Denerim would not even have to try to destroy me with their words. I would have destroyed myself. I would have brought weakness and ignominy upon my name, and every templar from here to Orlais would be sent out to drag me down and destroy everything that I had given my life to. 

Even then, coming back into myself, my body felt unfamiliar to me. Like being decanted into a vessel that was now too small to hold me. 

I woke up in a tiny cell with one single, startled templar watching over me. He drew his sword as I sat up in the narrow bed, and stared at me with uncertain, anxious eyes. 

He was young, fair-haired, and frightened. 

“Put down your blade,” I told him, and when he made no sign of complying: “How long have I been gone?”

I felt him push against me with his mind, and I was not prepared for the force with which he did so. I had never faced a templar before, and in that moment—dizzy and racked with sudden nausea—I began to understand why so many mages fear them.

While I was still regaining my composure, he sheathed his sword again. 

“You have not been taken,” he said, as though he couldn't quite believe it. 

“I could have told you that,” I said, putting the back of my hand to my mouth to stifle the rolling waves of nausea. “If you had asked. How long?”

He still did not dare to come any closer to me. 

“A week,” he said. The Knight-Commander thought—”

“That I had fallen,” I finished for him. “Or that it was only a matter of time. And so they left you here, in the hopes that your cries for help would reach them before I tore every single one of them apart.”

I was beginning to recover. At least, enough to test him him, and his eyes hardened in response to the challenge. 

“There are two dozen templars on this floor,” he said. “Just waiting to cut you down if it is necessary.”

I dismissed his attempts to threaten me with a careless swipe of my hand. 

“Tell me,” I said. “I have heard that the templars slaughter any mage who is Harrowed for too long. That they assume that we have failed, and they kill us. Why did your Knight-Commander spare me?”

The young templar shook his head. 

“The order to wait came directly from Teyrn Loghain,” he said. “We were told to hold until the matter was decided for us, one way or another.”

I managed a small, humourless laugh. 

“Loghain needed his course of action to appear entirely blameless,” I said to no one in particular. “He didn't want to take the risk that the templars would kill a man instead of a monster, and turn me into a martyr for the people of Highmoor after all.”

“And inflame the arling that is already on the brink of civil war because of what you've done,” the templar finished for me. 

Once again, my curiosity was piqued.

“You see to know an awful lot about me, templar.”

He shrugged defensively. 

“I read the letter you had posted at the bottom of the Tower,” he said. “To understand the nature of the monster I was guarding.”

Slowly and painfully, I forced my wasting muscles into action, and gingerly placed my feet down on the floor. 

“I can imagine,” I said carefully, easing a little life back into my body. “That your Knight-Commander does not approve of his men reading the missives of known terrorists.”

The templar was still watching me, gauging everything I said. By the Maker he was young. Barely more than a boy. 

“The king has banned your papers,” he said. “I read them anyway.”

I felt a twinge in the corner of my mouth that threatened to become a smile, and stifled it before it had the chance to live. 

I sat forwards on the bed. 

“What is your name, templar?”

His hand strayed unconsciously to the pommel of his sword. 

“My name isn't any of your business, mage,” he said. “And just because I have read your poison propaganda does not mean that I agree with a single word of it. It does not mean that I don't know you for a murderer and a terrorist.”

I held up my hands in parley. 

“I did not say it did,” I told him. 

I held his gaze steadily and calmly. He could still run me through at any moment and try to convince his Knight-Commander that the demon had taken me. I was going to have to be more careful. 

I could see the mixture of anger and apprehension boiling in his eyes. 

Finally, he moved his hand away from his sword. I think we both breathed a sigh of relief. 

“I'm Tristrum,” he said. 

He hadn't qualified his name with a rank. 

I was starting to think that I might quite grow to like him.

“Tristrum,” I repeated. “I suspect your fellow templars would like to know that they shall have find another way of dealing with this particular murderer and terrorist. Perhaps you should see that they are told.”


	26. 27 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

It was not a simple thing to win the trust of my jailer—the man that would finally set me free from the Circle's grasp. For many years, Tristrum and I argued. These discussions were sometimes heated, and often painful. He held (and still does hold) the deep and sincere belief that, no matter what injustices have been committed in the world, it does not justify a massacre.

In turn, I found him to be driven, honest, and utterly sincere in his belief in what is right and wrong. When we began, it was my ardent intention to dissuade him of this perceived naivete and win him over to my cause so that he may be of assistance to me in ultimately escaping the Tower. However, as the years passed, I could not help but be swayed in turn by the fervency of his idealism.

I found that, confronted with his ceaseless questions on whether there had been no other way, I began to look back at the destruction that I had left behind, and ask that question of myself.

It took longer than that for me to understand that I needed the temperance he was offering to me, and longer still before I would accept it.

I still do not believe that there we had much choice in it, but slowly I started to accept that perhaps, in the future, there would be another way. More than anything, Tristrum reminded me that, should that happen, I would have the chance to choose a different path. 

I could not, and cannot, regret what I did in Hinter. If nothing else, that regret would undermine the deaths of the two hundred people that I must bear on my conscience. However, with time I began to see that I had grown so filled with anger and hatred that I was blind to there being any alternative to it.

I am not certain I shall ever get the chance to do things differently, but if I do, I know that I shall not let it pass.


	27. 28 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

As I grew used to life inside the Circle Tower, I began to accept that I was never getting out. What's more, it was clear that causing any dissent within the ranks would result in the most dire consequences—not just for me, but for anyone who I involved in my political manoeuvrings. I was at the mercy of the templars and the senior enchanters—all of us were—however, the enchanters in turn viewed me especially with a mixture of suspicion and derision.

There was no way that I could continue to contact my friends in Highmoor. Not without eventually leading the authorities directly to their doors. And so, after three months, I made the difficult decision to detach myself from everything that was happening in my homeland. By showing Tristrum the letter that I intended to send back to the fragments of resistance left in Highmoor, I gained his assistance in having it delivered somewhere where I knew that Rye would find it.

I could not resent the other mages for their distrust of me: They were as much at the templars' mercy as I was. They spent their every day trapped within the Circle Tower, forced to carve out the only lives that they could ever make for themselves—as willing servants of the Chantry.

I had always known that mages not lucky enough to live as apostates were trapped in the same cycle of oppression that kept the Ascellan people in the workshops of Highmoor, and the city elves shut up in their alienages, but I had never seen it with my own eyes until that moment.

Nor had I ever been surrounded by so many people as skilled in the workings of the Fade, and so I determined to spend my time in that place learning as much as I could from them, and in bettering the lot that was afforded to us all.

It was far easier to gain the trust of the apprentices and the newly initiated mages, of course, but then it is always the young who are the most accepting of outsiders. With time, the young mages I befriended became enchanters, and they began to turn to me when the templars placed unreasonable demands on them. They asked for my opinion when the Chantry censored or confiscated the letters that were passed between the enchanters of the other Circles in Thedas, or when another mage was threatening to disrupt the delicate balance that we all tried so hard to maintain.

In Highmoor, history had branded me the Butcher of Funalis, and I had to work hard to be worthy of any trust that was placed in me by those I met in the Circle. But I was trapped within that place, I had been spared an execution, released by the demons of the Fade, and had resolved to do what good I could in what time that I had left.

Although the Tower was still a prison (and sometimes an unbearable one), I cannot say that the ten years that I have spent there are the worst years of my life. In many ways, it was like the years I spent back at the Crossing with Rye and Terra. Here, too, I was called upon to strike deals with the Circle's foremen and forge masters, negotiate with anyone that was prepared to consort with the underclass, and take steps to undermine those who would not. The only difference seemed to be that instead of working with my shoulder to the wheel in a gang of cartwrights, now I taught healing spells and salves to children in the libraries of the Tower. And, where I had once tended to the sick and starving at the Crossing, now we received visitors from as far away as the Brecilian Forest and the border with the Frostback Mountains in search of the relief our healing could provide.

Eventually, and much to the dismay of the Knight-Commander, I was made an enchanter myself. After that, I grew to know the senior enchanters and templars well. I began to understand then how the entire Circle was in a precarious position—undermined by petty factionalism, fraternities and infighting.

A part of me could not help but prepare itself for the moment when it all came crashing down.


	28. 29 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

Winter is now truly upon us. 

Over the past week, the rain has turned slowly into sleet, and now to a steady snow. There seems to be little hope that we will reach the Crossing before winter makes the moors inaccessible, or that there will be anyone left alive there, even if we do. 

But Tristrum grows a little stronger by the day, and I am very much pulled along in his wake. My fears about his resolve now feel unfounded, and he seems more determined than ever to push us on through this blasted, unforgiving cold. 

We hold our lives in one another's hands now. For better or for worse.


	29. 30 Firstfall 9:30 Dragon

The nights are freezing beyond all our imaginings, the frost clouds Tristrum's armour from mirror-silver to a dull grey-white. As though the landscape itself is beginning to absorb him. The snow makes any progress that we are able to achieve perilously slow.

We cannot be more than a week out of the Crossing now, and the coming of the winter has brought us one respite, at least: The snow that falls upon the moors is free of the Taint that turns all water to poison. 

We have but little food left, but at least we may now fill our water skeins with icemelt. 

It fuels our desperate voyage southwards like a blessing from the sky.


	30. 1 Haring 9:30 Dragon

Of all the mages with the potential to bring violence and death upon the Circle, Uldred was amongst the most dangerous. His unquenchable desire for freedom for us all found resonance with me, and we spent many long nights debating what would need to be done to liberate all mages from the grip of the templars during our lifetimes. 

But for every way in which he reminded me of myself in the days before the Funalis, he reminded me most of Tibus in his recklessness, and in his desire to grasp at any thread that might bring about his goal—regardless of the consequences. There was little reasoning with him, and he showed a tendency and aptitude to manipulate everyone around him that unsettled even me. 

Perhaps that was just evidence of the well-worn marks that Tristrum had left upon my conscience.   
I would be a hypocrite to blame Uldred for what he has done, but I still cannot accept that it was more about gaining freedom for mages than it was about his own personal thirst for power. From whatever channel he could acquire it. 

Either way, the life that those labelled as 'magic workers' were forced to endure has begun to mean something to me in the last decade, and as it did, I commenced work on a fresh series of letters and missives that were passed between the Circles along with the other enchanters' diatribes on politics and magic. 

It did not make me popular amongst many of the templars, however, and although we rarely received news from outside world, Tristrum would sometimes bring reports from the northern shore of Lake Calenhad that suggested that little had changed in Highmoor, either. 

After Estraven's death at the Massacre of Funalis, King Maric had appointed a new arl to Highmoor: Tobias Ailan. 

Ailan was a moderate, and the more I heard about him the more I thought that I could see Teyrn Loghain's influence in him. I wondered whether I had found more purchase with Loghain than I had thought. For many years, it seemed as though the Ascellan were achieving their freedom by degrees. Some even found themselves able to once again own the land that our ancestors had lived upon for centuries. 

But, for all Ailan's appearances of reform, Highmoor still struggled underneath Ferelden rule, and there was a growing voice amongst the Ascellan to once again try and regain the arling for our own.   
I heard almost nothing more of the fermenting disquiet in the arling, but could not help but think I saw Rye's hand in it. 

Either way, it was not simply a matter of the growing resistance in Highmoor that brought King Cailan to my door. My letters had begun to pass through the hands of initiates as far afield as Kirkwall and Starkhaven, and they had done little to improve my reputation.

Although I had spent many years resenting Loghain for everything he had done and everything that he had stood for, I could not help but feel an almost respect for the man who, ultimately, had outwitted me. I knew little of how King Maric had ruled, but I was certain of one thing: That his chief advisor was astute, intelligent and a consummate politician. 

Unfortunately, none of these things could be said of Maric's son. 

King Cailan was a pompous idiot and a fool, and it does not grieve me to hear that he has most likely died at Ostagar. Ferelden shall be a better place without him. 

Cailan called on me early one morning in Cloudreach, not long after I had washed and dressed. He was shown into my room by the First Enchanter with no small amount of ceremony. I was more surprised by the sudden arrival of the King of Ferelden in my chambers, than I had been to see his father's teyrn in my cell in Hinter. Either way, I did my best not to let him see it. 

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

Cailan's eyes flared with the kind of misplaced pride and pomposity that is common when you attempt to treat nobility as though they are no better than you. 

“Have some respect, wretch,” he told me. “You stand before your king.”

“I do no such thing,” I said. “You are not my king. You have not done anything to earn my respect, and you shall not have it until it is deserved.”

Ten years earlier, I had stood eye-to-eye with Loghain to show him that he was no better than me, and he had proved himself my equal. Cailan seemed to me to be little more than a boy. 

I sat down on the edge of my mattress, and I waited. 

“I suppose,” said Cailan. “That I should not have expected anything more from the man they call the Butcher of Funalis. A man who has spread lies throughout my kingdom. My father was lenient with you when he allowed you to live.”

I looked up at him with my hands gathered between my knees, and I smiled. 

“Your father allowed me to survive when he sent me here,” I said. “But he did not allow me to live. No one would dare allow any of the mages in this place to do something as ostentatious as that.”

I paused to make sure that he had understood my meaning, and added:

“I am at your service, your majesty. Just like every mage that survives in this prison you have built for us. We are, each and every one of us, your slaves. So tell me, what may I do for you?”

“To start with,” Cailan said. “You will give me your assurance that you will stop spreading your pestilence and atheism amidst the mages of this place, and of the other Circles in Thedas.

“Then,” he continued without waiting for me to answer. “You can forswear violence as a means of fulfilling your objectives—whatever _they_ may be—and call upon your countrymen to do the same.”

Cailan seemed harried. The situation in Highmoor must be much worse than I had been led to believe. After all, it had seemingly brought the king himself all the way to Lake Calenhad, and to the Butcher of Funalis, to try and put an end to it. 

“Tell me, your majesty,” I teased him. “Have my countrymen, as you put it, been causing you grief? We don't hear much news from the outside world locked up in this Tower.”

Cailan's expression darkened, and I watched his temper as it began to unravel. 

“Don't toy with me, Malik. Your homeland is on the brink of civil war. It is your duty to do something about it.”

I blinked my eyes, slowly and deliberately. 

“And what makes you think that anyone in Highmoor will listen to me? I haven't been anywhere near the Hinterlands in almost a decade.”

“I think that they will listen to you because many of the thugs who have been killing guardsmen down there look to you like some kind of bloody hero. They disseminate your senseless propaganda, and refuse to see sense or do what is right for their people. I am trying to prevent another bloodbath,” he said. “And these thugs hang on every word you speak as though you were the Maker himself.”

“ _There is no Maker, Cailan_ ,” I told him ardently, more out of habit than intent. “There is no higher power dictating how we should all live our lives. There is just you, and me, and your guardsmen, and every other person—man and woman, rich and poor, human and elf—in all of Thedas.”

By now, he was glowering at me. 

“I will not waste my time listening to your filth,” he said. “Will you concede to my demands?”  
I raised my hands, and spread my fingers. 

“Your majesty,” I said. “What possible reason would I have to help you to keep the Ascellan people underneath the yoke of your rule?”

Cailan snorted. 

“I could make your life here more comfortable if you were to assist me in restoring peace to your homeland. Allow you a degree of contact with the outside world again, perhaps. That is what you want, isn't it? Alternatively, I could make your existence here as excruciatingly painful as you deserve.”

Finally, I got to my feet. 

“You will forgive me,” I said as I stepped towards the door. “If I see every day in which I am imprisoned here as a torture. Or if there is little more that you could do to me, or few threats left that you could make, that would make me care a single jot for your affairs of state. 

“Now, if you will excuse me, I have a class of initiates waiting for me in the library.”

“And allow you to continue to sow dissent amongst the children here?” he said. “No.”

Cailan's guardsmen stepped into my path, and I linked my hands behind my back. 

“Osinis,” Cailan told one of the guards. “Have the templars strip this man of his standing, his staff and his robes. Then have them throw him in solitary confinement until such a time as I deem it safe to release him.”

Cailan stepped past me and into the doorway, and gave me a look that would cut stone. 

“And that is more than you deserve, Malik,” he told me. “You may thank the _Maker_ that I am showing you such mercy.”


	31. 2 Haring 9:30 Dragon

“It is unconscionable!” Tristrum protested. “You have done nothing wrong! You are not a blood mage, you haven't attempted to escape the Circle Tower... How can they be doing this?”

“We are in Ferelden, Tristrum,” I told him quietly. “Fair is whatever King Cailan declares it to be.”

He was pacing, and bristling with fury. I don't think that I had ever seen him so enraged. 

“I cannot stand for it, Will. This is not justice. This is not _right_!”

I stood up slowly in the small, dark cell that the templars had locked me in, and placed my hand gently on his shoulder. 

“Calm yourself, Knight-Lieutenant,” I said gently. “We will gain nothing by you losing your temper with the Commander. If nothing else, then he is no more able to influence this than you are.”

“Then I shall take the matter to Teyrn Loghain,” he said. “Cailan cannot just lock you away in here and leave you to rot because you won't do as he says.”

“He would not be the first king to imprison his enemies and let them disappear into obscurity for disagreeing with him, Tristrum. And Loghain would not listen to you. He is the one who put me in here in the first place, hoping that the Harrowing chamber would take me. I am a wanted man in all of Ferelden. I killed one of Maric's most valued generals. Do not believe that anyone in Denerim will want to defend a man like that.

“You would lose your post, your commission, and would most likely end up in a dungeon in Denerim, and that would do little to help either of us.”

Tristrum exhaled hard with frustration, and sat down on my bunk. He pushed his fingers through his short, fair hair, and rested his head in his hands for several long, silent seconds. When he spoke again, he sounded calmer. Colder. As though he had resigned himself to the injustice of it all. 

“How can you live like this?” he said quiety. “How can you be so calm? He has robbed you of your freedom, Will.”

I smiled softly, and sat down beside him. 

“Cailan could not take something from me which I did not have to begin with, Tris,” I said. “And I... What is right and what is wrong does not concern me as much as it does you. You know that.”

Tristrum rubbed his face, pressing the tips of his fingers into his closed eyelids. 

“We must do _something_ , Will,” he whispered. “I cannot bear it if we do not.”

He paused for a long moment. The silence in that tiny cell was oppressive. 

“I want to help you,” he said at last. “Tell me what you need.”

He took his head out of his hands, and looked across at me. I could see that he meant every word of it, but it was more than that: I began to understand the depth of the betrayal that he felt in that moment. Betrayed by his Order. Betrayed by his King. 

I put my hand to his cheek. 

“You are a good man, Tristrum,” I told him softly. “And a friend. And for now, you are just going to have to accept those things, and trust me.”

Tristrum did not even falter. 

“Is there nothing else that I may do?”

I smiled at him, and stood to show him to the door.

“For now?” I said. “We wait.”


	32. 3 Haring 9:30 Dragon

For almost seven hours today, we waded through a driving blizzard. To begin with, we made little progress, and the endless, blinding white meant that we could no longer tell south from north, or up from down. 

Trying to retrace our steps has only resulted in further disaster. The snow erases all evidence that we were ever here almost before we are gone. 

Before this storm descended, we got one brief, enticing view of Hinter down the mountainside. Everything around her seems to lie barren and dead, but her walls are still standing, and there are guards upon her battlements, so there is hope still that there are people left alive out here. 

But if Arl Ailan's men still hold the city, then we could not risk heading towards it, and so instead we turned to the south in the desperate hope that the darkspawn horde had headed directly north from Ostagar, and had not yet consolidated itself enough to concern itself with Highmoor. 

It will only be a matter of time. Even the darkspawn cannot be stupid enough to ignore the strategic importance of the Forge of Ferelden. 

Now the wind is blowing like it is the end of the world, pulling at the canvas of our tent, and we are already half-buried in the snow. 

If it is the same again tomorrow, then we shall have no choice but to try and sit it out.


	33. 5 Haring 9:30 Dragon

The weather is no better, and I am too cold and desperate to write. 

If this storm does no break soon, then it is the winter—and not the darkspawn—that shall kill us.


	34. 6 Haring 9:30 Dragon

It was bitterly, bitterly cold last night, and I can no longer feel my feet and fingers. Writing has become difficult, but I must finish the story. 

We spent this morning digging ourselves out. But, now that we have, we find the snow has frozen over, and we may glance across the surface of its blinding whiteness like pebbles catching on the surface of a stream.


	35. 7 Haring 9:30 Dragon

My situation in the Tower did not change, and after eight months of confinement (relieved only by the secret meetings that Tristrum kept with me, for he dared not smuggle books or papers into my cell), my state of mind was growing increasingly desperate. 

What was worse, Tristrum had brought word that Cailan's men themselves had intervened to restore order in Highmoor, and that every effort was being made to crush the revolution that would seen the Ascellan lands returned to the Ascellan people. 

I had spent almost a decade trying with all my heart not to think about the Hinterlands and what was happening down there, but with nothing but the silence of my cell for company I finally found that I could think of little else. 

More than anything, it was the sense of utter impotence and futility that wore me down, and worried at the edges of my sleep. I could not get past the idea that I must do _something_ to help my people fight the same battle that I had fought for almost my entire life. But I was deprived of every freedom and agency afforded to the rest of Ferelden, and part of me could not help but wonder whether that had been King Cailan's plan all along. 

Eventually, I reached the end of the road that I had spent those eight months travelling along, and did the only thing that I could do: I stopped eating. 

Tristrum made sure that word of my hunger strike reached Hinter, and I could only hope that it might make some difference to the hearts of the people that were fighting and dying out there for the one cause that I had ever truly believed in. If it did not, then at the very least I would not have to face up to another year alone in that small, dark cell. 

It was only a few days afterwards that Tristrum came to me and told me that he was being sent to Denerim with a collection of phylacteries forcibly taken from the bodies of newly-Harrowed mages.   
“If I could somehow gain access to the vault, Will,” he said. “If I could find your phylactery there and destroy it...”

“And you would most likely be caught, or else they would find my phylactery missing, those who already suspect you would take the opportunity to absolve you of your responsibility to the Order, and I would still be here.”

Tristrum's face clouded over with anger, and he struck out with his gauntlet at the unhewn stone of the wall. There was the crunching of struck metal, and a thin shower of pale sparks. 

“Maker's breath, Will!” He was shouting at me now. “You are not the only one that is trapped in here, don't you understand that?!”

His words found their mark well enough, and brought me up short before I could find anything else to say. He was right, of course, he was as much a prisoner here as I was and it was killing him as surely as it was killing me. 

I had been locked up in the darkness for so long that it was starting to make me selfish. I don't know, maybe I always had been. 

I held up my hands in silent apology, and hoped that he could see I understood. 

“Do you want to die up here in this cell?” he demanded. “Make a martyr of yourself? Is that what all of this is about?”

“I am not afraid to die,” I said carefully and steadily, my hands still held up in surrender. “But you must believe me when I say that I have no desire to invite it in.”

He bunched his gauntlets into fists, and sighed. 

“Then why do you always persist like this?”

“Because I have seen too many people die because they were impatient, Tristrum. Or because _I_ was impatient.”

“But if I never... If _we_ never have another chance like this—” 

“We will,” I said. “I know we will. Right now, the templars are probably watching you. There are more than a few dissenting voices in the Order that suspect you have grown too close to me, and we cannot risk them finding you out through this. 

“This isn't about me martyring myself, Tristrum. Do you think that I don't want you to escape from here and find a better life for yourself? A better way for you to strive for what you believe is right? The last thing that I want is for my selfish desire to get out of here to lead you to a cell in the dungeon of your own.

“The Chantry are not stupid,” I said. “They will have checks in place to make sure that nobody can get into the vault without permission. Not even a Knight-Lieutenant.”

He sighed, and slumped down against the wall, defeated. 

“Do you even have a plan?” he said. 

I shrugged. 

“No,” I told him. “But I will know when I see one.”


	36. 8 Haring 9:30 Dragon

After a month, the hunger had made me so weak and exhausted that I slept away most of my days in blissful ignorance of the oppressive silence of that cell. After a further two weeks, every muscle in my body began to waste away. 

It was then that the dreams began.

In the beginning, it wasn't always Morgan that I dreamed of, but as the weeks passed, he drew me to him like a stone drawn into deep water, and I sank towards him willingly. I had accepted that I would die there in that cell. The only thing that troubled me about it was the look I saw in Tristrum's eyes when he tended to me in my sickness, and held a wooden cup of water to my lips. 

The dreams made the last few weeks I had more bearable. 

I was, I think, more content than I had been in years. I looked forwards to my death as the point at which I could fall into those dreams, and never have to wake.

I did not suspect then that the dreams were the work of a demon preying upon my weakened state of mind and body in order to feed itself from me. 

I myself no longer felt the hunger. 

I felt nothing at all. 

And so, when I awoke to the day that Tristrum finally succeeded in destroying my phylactery, more than anything else I felt a profound and unbearable sense of loss. 

He had been sent to Denerim to destroy the blood of a young mage who had taken his own life, as so many of us do. The first I heard of it was when he shook me from my dreams to tell me that he had switched that poor man's blood with my own, and destroyed my phylactery in front of the Revered Mother herself. 

I wanted so badly to share in his elation—not least because his plan had been a good one, and he had executed it perfectly. But Morgan still drew me to him like a thread in the dark, and even if he did not, I think I was too weak then, and had been a prisoner for too long, to even entertain those dreams of a new life for both of us. 

And so I thanked Tristrum with all the breath that I had left, all the while hoping that death would take me before I had to invest my fragile hopes in thoughts of an escape.


	37. 9 Haring 9:30 Dragon

“Will, wake up!”

Tristrum's voice felt more like a memory than a physical, tangible thing. It felt as though it was coming from years away. 

“Will, you must wake up! We have to leave!”

As I came around, I could still feel Morgan's fingers interlaced with mine, dragging me back down. But Tristrum did not relent, and eventually I became aware of the sound that radiated upwards through the stones of the Tower itself: The sound of people screaming. 

“Will, please! Wake up!”

I was very close to death then. It was only with great effort that I managed to open my eyes.   
“What's... What's happening?”

“It's Uldred,” Tristrum told me with a mixture of terror and exhilaration. “He's gone mad. His people are going through the Tower, killing everyone. It won't be long before they reach us. Hurry!”

I tried, for a long time, to make sense of what he was telling me. 

“Uldred?”

Tristrum took me by the hands. 

“He has been consorting with demons,” he said.

I swallowed against the dryness of death that stuck in my throat. 

“Are there abominations?”

“Beyond number.” His mouth was as dry as mine with the horror of what he had seen. “They are butchering them. All of them. The templars have lost control, Will. We have to get out of here. Can you stand?”

I tried to press my arms into the mattress, and closed my eyes to stop the light from hurting me. 

“I don't think so.”

I wanted so badly to go back to sleep. I could feel the tears escaping down my cheeks. 

“We won't get out of here alive, Tristrum. If Uldred's people have the Tower—”

“There is another way.” Tristrum took hold of my arms carefully, and helped me to my feet. “A staircase that the templars built to evacuate the Tower if it was ever lost. I read about it in the archives a week ago. I was going to use it to help us escape. I don't think that anybody else knows about it. The guards outside are gone. I can get you out of here, Will. I can get us both out of here.”

My knees buckled underneath me. My legs seemed barely even attached to my body any more, let alone able to support my weight. At last, though, the faint spark of hope had begun to rekindle itself inside me. 

Tristrum as good as carried me from my cell. 

Above the sound of all those screams, I could hear something else radiating out through the stone. I could hear another voice. 

“Excuse me? A little help here would be nice! What's going on out there?”

I called to Tristrum to stop two or three times before he heard me. He looked ready to fight or die trying to get us out. 

“There's someone else up here,” I told him. “The key... Do you have the key?”

Tristrum eased me back against the wall, and I slumped to the floor as he fumbled with the lock.   
As it opened, and a young, fair-haired man wearing the robes of the Ferelden Circle and two gold hoops through one of his ears, stumbled out and looked around the corridor as though it was the surface of the moon. I could understand that feeling. 

He had been in here a while. 

“You have to let me out!” he appealed to Tristrum, mistaking him for one of his fellow templars. “The screaming... You have to tell me what...”

He stopped, and I realised that he was staring at me. 

“Maker's breath!” he said. “You're Gwillym Malik, aren't you? I used to take your class on healing spells. I read your papers. I... By the Maker, you look awful! I had heard that you hadn't eaten in two months, but... here.”

He knelt down over me, taking my face in his hands and resting his forehead against mine. Everything seemed to happen so quickly, and as I felt the flow of lyrium through his blood and down into his fingers I tried vainly to push back against him. But my body was too frail, and my mind had shattered into a thousand separate shards. I was horrified to find that I was as immune to working magic as a dwarf, and could do little but allow this young mage to work his will on me.   
The sensation was warm at first, but it quickly blossomed into the pain that near-death had been shielding me from. But more than that, so much more than all of that, I felt _alive_. 

As he drew away, he locked eyes with me, and offered me his hand. With some surprise, I realised that I was standing. 

“That is all that I can do for you right now,” he said. “But you will need more. Much more.”

I flexed my fingers slowly. 

“You are very talented,” I told him. 

The young mage smiled. 

“I had some very talented teachers,” he said. 

I put my hand on his shoulder, and looked beyond him into the gloom where Tristrum was still waiting. 

“We need to get out of here.”

The mage nodded, resolute. 

“You have a plan, I assume?” he said. “One that doesn't involve me having to swim across Lake Calenhad? Again.”

I watched Tristrum very carefully. The faint flutters of torchlight caught on the mirrored silver of his armour. 

“I sincerely hope so,” I said. “Because I don't feel much like swimming.”


	38. 10 Haring 9:30 Dragon

Escaping the Circle Tower as our whole world crumbled down around us was not easy, and the young mage that we had found locked up in the cell next to mine had chance to prove himself invaluable in fighting the templars and abominations that had overrun the Tower. Tristrum fought and killed two of his own brethren to get us out—men and women that he had known for as long as he had lived there. 

It was a templar's blade that wounded him at last, and it was his strength that go us into that small boat and across Lake Calenhad to the shore. 

There, I sent away the young mage who had fought his way out alongside us. We were heading into harm's way, and he needed to get as far away from all of it as he could lest he be sucked down with us. 

I was still so weak that I could barely even think. 

I never even asked him for his name.


	39. 11 Haring 9:30 Dragon

And then it got dark. 

I have returned to where I began—what feels like an eternity ago—when I commenced to tell this story. 

There is nothing more to tell now, and I have almost exhausted every margin of the leather journal that Tristrum brought into this wilderness for me. 

Now, I can only hope that we survive. 

We _cannot_ be far out of the Crossing now.


	40. 14 Haring 9:30 Dragon

I fear our cause is all but lost. 

We shall both die out here. 

The cold has got into my bones. I can no longer heal myself, and can no longer walk. 

Tristrum believes that we are only a few hours from the Crossing, but I have stared at the maps and blasted moors and snow for so long that I no longer know where, or when, we are. 

My feet are badly frostbitten, and Tristrum has pushed on ahead to try and find a way through the deep snow that fell overnight. 

I have not seen him in more than a day. 

Time makes little sense. 

I dream.

Perhaps death will come for me after all. If it does, then at least I have said everything I needed to.


	41. 15 Haring 9:30 Dragon

All of this must change. 

I have bee sleeping often to escape the cold, and every time I do he is there waiting for me. 

My desire for him has always overruled the best part of my mind. The more I dream, the harder it becomes to fight. 

Late into the night, he whispered to me. Insisting that I stay with him forever. 

I cannot refuse him.

Not any more. 

Not even now I know what it is that hides within that dream. 

And yet... And yet the further we have travelled into Highmoor, and the more that I have written here, the more I have remembered everything that I once fought for. The flames that revolution once kindled in my heart. 

I can take no more of this. I will not die here. I have insisted that the demon show me its true self so that I may speak with it directly. 

Perhaps I can refuse it more easily than I can turn Morgan out into the cold.

* * *

It is done. 

Everything that happens now, for good or ill, shall be on my own shoulders. 

I could not turn my back on him in the end. Could not spend the rest of my life without the dreams of everything that my life could once have been. 

And yet I cannot give up. Not when the darkspawn threaten to wipe out my people. Wipe out the land that I have always fought to free. 

I have bargained with a demon. It shall give me what I need to fight this—fight all of it—and I shall try one final time to free my country from those who would rule over it, be they darkspawn, Orlesian or Ferelden. 

Once my fight is done, I shall give myself willingly to this spirit of my own desire. I will fall into this dream forever. But I cannot do it yet. I cannot give up when the battle is not won. 

I stole one final selfish hour with him once the demon that wears its skin had given me its knowledge.

He was not gentle with me, but I did not protest.


	42. 16 Haring 9:30 Dragon

I awoke this morning with the dawn, and felt stronger than I have done in years. I know that I am strong enough to do what must be done. 

I passed the blade of my boot knife across my forearm, and felt the strength of magic that is fired by life itself. 

We are all told from infancy that blood magic is dangerous beyond measure. That is why all knowledge of it has been eliminated, and the only way it may be learned is by trafficking with demons. But blood magic is the magic of our lives and deaths—in all its brutal, painful glory. The more we try to insulate ourselves from that, the more dangerous that it becomes. Only when it is taught, when it is _studied_ , may we truly and rationally understand the dangers it presents. 

The blood led me across the surface of the snow like a ghost to the outcropping an hour's walk away where Tristrum had taken shelter. I could feel it dripping from my fingers—warm and vial— leaving a trail of verdant red amongst the white. 

I had abandoned the last of our gear with the tent, and moved all the more swiftly for it. When I found him, it was early afternoon, and he was close to death. 

And so I cut the tips of my fingers with my knife and touched my blood to his, and when he awoke he saw what I had done. 

He did not draw his blade, but his eyes betrayed that he was scared of me. 

Some things are too important to let pass, and so we sat and talked for almost an hour, and I did my best to break through they years of training that have taught him blood magic is evil, and that all blood mages should be put to death. 

He understands a little better now, I think. Or at least, he understands me a little better. Tristrum knows me, and he trusts me—whether he wishes to or not. I only had to find a way to capitalise on that. 

Deep down, he knows that if I had not used this forbidden magic, then we would both be dead. I did not have it in me to tell him about Morgan, but he has accepted the responsibility to watch over me. And, on the day that I give myself over to my own selfish, bitter love, I know he will be there to ensure that I am dead before I succeed in destroying everything that I have worked for. 

By dusk, he was convinced enough that we headed up the ridge that he had faltered on, and looked down into the valley to see the Crossing nestled in the snow drifts—her pale yellow lights burning underneath a sky of blue and red and gold, her chimney smoke casting a thin veil over her face. 

The Road of Bones stretched out towards the east like spine of bleached, white bone in the rising moonlight. When the darkspawn come, it shall be down that blasted road. 

They have not yet reached the town. 

If I could believe in miracles...

We are preparing to make our way down the mountainside. By morning, I shall set foot in the town that I was born, for the first time in more than a decade.


	43. 17 Haring 9:30 Dragon

It has been many years since I last experienced the physical sensation of joy as intensely as I have done today. 

Before we even reached the Crossing late into last night, we could see the people that were left alive down here, and as we finally set foot into the outskirts of the town, Tristrum had me show him to one of the houses near the largest smithy in the Crossing. He has placed so much of his trust in me these past few hours. No, it is more than that. He has placed so much trust in me over the last ten years, and so I did as he asked without question, and it was only when the door opened and I found Rye standing on the other side of it that I truly understood the depth of everything that my jailer has done for me. That he had been in contact with Rye long before we escaped the Circle Tower. 

Rye seems to have suffered much in the last ten years, and the broadsword scar on the left side of his face is testament to a wound that he was fortunate to survive. 

I did not know what he would think of me after so many silent years. As he showed us inside and put us before the fire, I held out my hands to him. He watched for a long time before he stepped in and embraced me. 

“I didn't expect to see you alive again,” he admitted. 

I pressed my eyes closed and drew him against me as tightly as I could. 

“It was touch and go for a while, Rye.”

He has installed himself in a workshop in the middle of the Crossing with almost two dozen strong, loyal men and women around him, and after a few minutes someone had stoked the fire and brought us food. I cannot explain how welcome the heat and food was after so many weeks of cold and hardship. 

“I heard that Cailan offered you a full pardon if you'd disown us,” Rye said. “And that you suck your finger in his eye.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. 

“Good for you, Will. Good for you.”

“Ah, so it was your work after all,” I said, placing my bowl down on the floor beside me. “When Tristrum told me the body count, I thought I'd seen your hand in it.”

Rye laughed, and spread his hands in mock-apology, and I got to my feet. It was harder than I'd anticipated, and I was forced to steady myself against Tristrum's shoulder. 

“What's the situation out here, Rye?” I said. “We passed a lot of darkspawn on our way south.”  
Rye nodded, an unrolled the maps onto the tabletop for me. 

“Most of them seem to have been focused on pressing north for now,” he said, tracing the line of the Imperial Highway with the tip of his index finger. “But these last few days we've had to fight tooth and bollock to keep them off.”

I tapped my fingers against my lips, and stared down at the maps. 

“You think that we don't have much time.”

“I think that the second those bastards run out of nice, soft, Ferelden villages to pillage and start coming up against fortified cities like Redcliffe, they are going to start thinking about spreading out to the west and east and consolidating their position,” he said. “When that happens, we haven't got a chance.”

I watched him across the table in the thin light of the candles. It all seemed so unreal. Barely thirty six hours ago I had been about to die out there in the snow. Now we were preparing for an army.

“Do you have a plan?”

Rye shrugged. 

“You mean aside from sitting here and waiting for them to kill us?”

“This is serious, Rye. If we don't act quickly then every Ascellan in Highmoor... Our entire people will be wiped out.”

Rye smirked at me, and shook his head. 

“You always were a humourless bastard,” he told me. “But I think that mage tower has actually made you worse. I heard a couple of years back that they'd mounted an expedition into the Deep Roads to look for your sense of humour. Sorry to hear it was beyond saving.”

I pushed my fingers through my hair. I tried, but I couldn't help but laugh. 

“I heard people say that it's more than a week beneath the surface,” I said. “If it exists at all. Personally? I think it's a myth.”

Rye's smirk turned into a smile, and he finally turned his attention back to the map. 

“The darkspawn have taken almost everything more than ten miles north of here as far as we can tell,” he said. “And there are significant forces mustering here, here and here.”

I watched him point out the shaded sections on the map. 

“They have completely overrun Aelos, Templeton, Fairway, and almost all of Furnacehammer.”  
My fingers drummed against my lips. 

“How many people were in those towns?”

Rye shrugged again. 

“Four, maybe five thousand.”

I heard Tristrum exhale slowly and shakily behind me. 

“Maker's breath.”

Rye chewed at his lip, and kept staring down at the table. 

“We've had a few hundred refugees come through here,” he went on. “Most of them were heading north, trying to get out of the arling all together. The rest of them we've put up here as best we can. The Chantry left about four days ago, so since then we've used it to house the refugees.”

I thought about all of those people heading north, trying to outrun the darkspawn horde. I didn't much fancy their chances, and even if they made it...

“I can't imagine that Ascellan refugees would get priority treatment in Redcliffe right now,” I said.  
“Yeah, that's what I thought,” Rye agreed. “But we might not get a choice in the matter. We have plenty of weapons stashes in the Crossing, but... You know what it's like, Will. The town isn't a defensible position. If the darkspawn want it, then they'll just roll in and take it. It's just a matter of time.”

I rubbed my cheek, then closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to force my brain into action. 

“What about Hinter?”

“Dunno,” Rye said. “We heard a couple of days ago that Arl Ailan had abandoned it, taken his whole army south to the Landsmeet in Denerim.”

“Shit.”

My fingers had started to clench up, and I dug my knuckles slowly and firmly into the tabletop.   
“There are almost six thousand people in that city.”

Rye nodded. 

“More,” he said. “Since the Blight. I heard the whole place was overrun with refugees.”

“And now their lord and master has left them there to die,” I snorted. “What do you want to do, Rye?”

“We've been arguing about that one for days,” he said. “I guess if we take all the weapons that we can from here then we can head north, reach Hinter before the darkspawn do and try and evacuate everyone before the horde descends.”

I stared at the tiny spot on the map that depicted the stone walls and the keep of Hinter. 

“A lot of people will die if the darkspawn catch up with a convoy of seven or eight thousand people heading north in the open,” I said. “And even if we managed it we would have to throw ourselves at the mercy of the Fereldens.”

“What other choice do we have, Will?” Tristrum asked. 

He was standing beside me and looking at my face, but I was only watching Rye. 

I said, “Have you considered the possibility that we might hold the city?”

“What?!” Tristrum looked aghast. “You can't be serious, Will. This is a Blight that we are talking about. Every man and woman in the arling will die if we don't get them out of its path.”

I was still watching Rye. 

At last, he said, “I have thought about it.”

Tristrum was unrelenting. 

“Will, you have seen what it is like out there. How can you even be entertaining the idea? These are your own people! You can't old off a Blight with pitchforks and a few stolen swords!”

I could see Rye's temper beginning to catch. 

“Listen, kid,” he told Tristrum. “You don't know shit about my people, so maybe you should just shut the hell up.”

“We're not making any decisions just yet,” I said, trying to make as much peace as I could.   
When Tristrum sighed and stood down, I turned my attention back to Rye. 

“Have they rebuilt the keep in the last ten years?”

“Sure,” he said. “And fortified the walls, too. It's tighter than a Revered Mother's asshole up there.”

“You still know your way around?”

Rye nodded. 

“Good,” I said. “How many soldiers to you have out here?”

Tristrum turned his back on us, and walked towards the fire. 

“Thirty-four men and women in the Crossing,” Rye said. “Not counting the three of us. Before the Blight we had maybe another two dozen in and around Hinter, and another hundred or so spread out across the rest of the arling. I doubt more than half of them survived.”

I rubbed my chin, and looked down at the curtain wall of Hinter—imagining the small, black blotches of the Blight spreading out across the map like spilled ink to surround it on all sides. 

“We have fought to keep this land all our lives,” I said. “I won't just up sticks and leave it to the Blight. We have to try.”

Rye crossed his arms, and smiled. 

“I was hoping you might say that.”

Behind me, Tristrum slammed the flat of his hand against the mantle. 

“By the Maker, Will, would you stop and listen to what you're saying? The Blight has already spread far to the north of here. Nothing will grow for a hundred miles around the city once the rot sets in. There will be no food, and once the snow stops falling we will have no drinking water, and seven thousand thirsty, hungry, frightened people.”

I turned around, and took a step towards him. 

“We can do this, Tristrum,” I told him. “There is _always_ a way. I know this land better than any darkspawn horde. We will have more chance of surviving if we can find a defensible position, begin recruiting soldiers to man the walls, and fight. Trust me. The walls of Hinter haven't fallen in a thousand years.”

I'm not sure how much I was able to persuade him, but he had followed me this far and had little choice now but to continue to do so. 

A few hours later, Rye and I were the only two left in front of the fire. I was still trying to get the cold out of my bones. Despite the reassurances that I had given to Tristrum, the ink stains on that map were worrying at the back of my mind. 

I sighed. 

“This is bad, Rye,” I told him. “Is this... Is this madness? Are the darkspawn going to kill every single man and woman in that city?”

Rye put his hand on my shoulder, and stood to go to bed. 

“Not while you and I are still breathing, Will,” he said. “Not while you and I are still breathing.”


	44. 24 Haring 9:30 Dragon

We were on the road in the midst of the winter for three long days, and two days ago we finally arrived in Hinter—bringing almost a thousand people along the narrow moorland paths with us.   
Any doubts I had about the necessity of holding the city are gone. We were too big a target, even on the most remote of moorland trails. The darkspawn attacked us twice along the way, we lost almost a hundred men and women. The more people we bring with us, the larger and slower moving a target we become, and if the darkspawn muster against us in the open then they will wipe every single one of us off of the face of existence without breaking a sweat. 

Hinter is completely overrun with refugees. Including the remaining population from the Crossing there must be almost ten thousand people taking shelter here. Many of them are children, the old, and the infirm. There is no way that we could bring them as far north as Redcliffe through driving snow in the middle of a Blight. 

We must stand our ground here, and if the city falls, then we shall all fall with her. 

It is chaos here. The people are beginning to panic. There is no leadership. No organisation. No one is taking headcounts. Many of the stronger and more able-bodied have already left the city thinking they can make it on their own. Murder has become commonplace since Arl Ailan abandoned his people, and the streets run red with blood and Blight. 

Rye has begun organising a fighting force to hold the walls, and we have sent Tristrum off into the surrounding countryside with handful of men and women to bring in as many supplies and survivors as he can. 

After that, we shall seal the city as tightly as we can, and hope to weather out the storm. 

Tonight, we have asked the people to gather in the keep's outer ward to discuss what is to be done. Rye is adamant that the only thing that can combat the despair is enfranchisement, and is suggesting that we call elections. That I stand to be their arl. 

He knows many of the people here, and has dragged the entire city kicking and screaming off of the brink of disaster in the twenty-four hours that we have been here. I am in awe of everything he has achieved in the last decade. Our support here is now greater than it ever was in the days before the Massacre. 

There are more than a hundred soldiers in this city who are well-trained and loyal to his orders, but it is so much more than that. There is the beginnings of a court system, independent from Ferelden rule. After more than forty years of trying, our people have finally taken the first few faltering footsteps towards governing themselves. In the decade that I have spent in the empty silence of the Circle Tower, Rye has slowly and studiously began to build the foundations of the free country that we always dreamed of founding. 

Now all that is left to do is to work out what I shall say to ten thousand people whose lives we now hold in our hands.

* * *

 _If we are to survive this, then we must all decide how we are to do it._

_I will not be easy. In the months ahead, many of us will fight. Many of us will die. There will be food shortages. The water shall be scarce. We cannot allow ourselves to be romantic about what the future holds. We can only prepare for it the very best that we can._

_I am not here to rule over you, or to tell you how that should be done. That is not what I have spent my life fighting for, or what I have spent the last decade locked up in the Circle Tower on Lake Calenhad for—stifled and silenced beneath the chains of Ferelden rule, and the sword arm of the Chantry._

_We are fighting for our lives here. I am not suggesting that we stop and give our time over to political reform. But if we are going to survive this—and I believe with my whole heart that we shall do that—then the only way that it can happen is if we put our faith and trust in one another. And we must have something that we are prepared to die for._

_For me, that is the same thing that I have always fought for—freedom. Freedom for ourselves and our children. The freedom to vote. The freedom to govern ourselves._

_The foundations of this city were laid a thousand years ago by Fereldens who wished to quell our ancestors and dominate our land, and now for the first time in the passing of nine ages, we have the chance to reclaim the soil on which it is built, and raise the golden flag above its walls._

_We shall do it by forging a new path for our children and our grandchildren. By not consenting to simply change the face of the foreman and the name above the door, but instead by building a new world for them out of this destruction. A world that is free and fair._

_We cannot resign ourselves to defeat and flee into the arms of the ones that have abandoned us to die out here. We shall stand on our own with swords in our hands._

_As of this moment, there are no rules here but the ones we make for ourselves. The time when we allowed ourselves to be ruled by those that we have not chosen is passed. Standing here in this last bastion of stone that holds against the darkness, we are all equal in our need to survive. We must govern this place in that spirit of equality, and the **only** way that may happen here is through the free and fair election of someone to guide us and defend us._

_I implore you to elect that person. It does not matter if that person is me, or someone who would stand against me. What matters is that you have the **right** to choose, and that you choose someone who will not rule **over** you, but **with** you. _

_That is the only way that this city can face the darkness that surrounds us and not only survive, but triumph, and drive the darkspawn—and anyone who would try and rob you of your freedom and your lives—back underneath the earth into the dark._


	45. 27 Haring 9:30 Dragon

I did not anticipate having to stand for election, or make speeches in front of thousands of people so soon after escaping the Circle Tower. I have never addressed a crowd of anything even approaching that size in all my life, and the experience was a terrifying one. 

Every one of them knew that I am an apostate, and many of them were not happy about the idea of following a mage to fight the footsoldiers of an archdemon. I had anticipated that, and so had Tristrum stand by my side as I spoke, so that they may all see the sword of the Chantry that is hammered into his armour. I hope that the inference was clear—that I do not have the unfettered power of a Tevinter Magister. That I am watched. That I am guarded. 

What I had not anticipated was the number of Ferelden freemen and women that the Chantry and Arl Ailan left behind when they fled the farms and workshops of Highmoor. These outcasts were not best pleased at the idea of falling in behind a convicted terrorist and notorious enemy of the Ferelden people. 

Fortunately for us, the alienage elves and Ascellan workers greatly outnumbered them, and were about as interested in seeing a Ferelden lead them through the Blight as the Ferelden's were in allowing me to do so. In the end, Rye standing on the other side of me and casting his vote against my name was enough to ensure the result. He has built more support here than I ever could have dreamed of. I worry that it is him who should be leading these people, not me, but he has dismissed the idea out of hand. Instead, I shall dedicate myself to listen to him and follow his guidance wherever I can. 

We cannot allow ourselves to overlook these Ferelden refugees. We shall have to draw on their strengths and their abilities to get through the Blight. Hinter's walls are almost impenetrable once the drawbridge is raised and the gates are locked down, but the problems that are facing us are many. The city itself may withstand a siege for as long as there is stone to repair the walls and soldiers enough to man the battlements, but the people themselves are made of flesh and bone—and there are ten thousand of them crammed inside these walls. 

All of the outlying farms are barren or overrun, and the river that runs through the centre of the city through heavily fortified archways to the south and north has turned to poison. As Tristrum so virulently pointed out while we were still in the Crossing—every one of the men and women here will need to be provided with food, water and shelter, and the city's stores grow more empty by the day. 

We have established a guild of works that will assess every person in the city and ensure that they are put to work in a capacity that makes the most use of their abilities. It was not a popular decision, but I sincerely believe that it was a necessary one. I have promised that only those who can fight shall be asked to join the city's guard, and that they shall not face the darkspawn until they have been properly trained and equipped to do so. 

The task of managing our armed forces will be difficult beyond reason, but I am confident that Rye is more than able to deal with it. 

In addition to scouring the surrounding towns and farms for survivors and supplies, I have also asked Tristrum to bring any remaining livestock or fresh water he can find back into Hinter. 

Water is by far our most pressing concern at this moment. For now, we are surviving by sending teams of workers outside the city during the day to gather cartloads of snow which can be melted down into drinkable water, but our fuel is also beginning to run low, and the unspeakable cold makes cutting whin and peat for the fire into backbreaking work. 

I have set the task of finding a solution to our water problems upon the guild of works. If they can at least design a system that can collect the rainwater, then when the weather breaks we shall be in better shape out here. We have trained smiths and carpenters amongst our number, and the designs that they are creating for a system of guttering and water sumps may well save all our lives.   
Later, I am meeting with some of the Ferelden farm owners that took a stand against me. They are the only ones in the city who know how to work the land, and we will need their help if we are to keep these people fed. 

The idea of holding farmland outside the city walls is impossible, so instead we must ensure that the population is managed in such a way that there is space enough to fit gardens and vegetable plots into every last remaining inch. Including the roof of the damned keep if it is necessary. 

It will not be enough. There are too many of us here, and some of us shall die before the weather breaks—let alone before the Blight retreats. The need to do everything that we can to save every life we can out here becomes ever more pressing for it. 

There are many sick and injured, and we have already been forced to eject over a dozen people that we suspected of falling prey to the Taint. It does little to bolster the spirits of the people, and there are too few apothecaries and physicians here to tend to the needy. 

The way to remedy that problem seems obvious to me: I have put out a call to any apostate mage that may be sheltering within the city, and offered them freedom, immunity and protection from persecution if they will make themselves known to the guild of works. 

For now, we can only hope that there are healers in this place besides myself.


	46. First Day 9:31 Dragon

We have made it to the beginning of a new year, and although survival is difficult, the loss of life so far has been relatively low. We have not yet encountered the darkspawn horde, and I am hoping to keep it that way for as long as humanly possible. 

I spent the first morning of this new year as I have spent every morning for the last week: Collecting reports from the scouting parties that Rye and Tristrum send out into the wilderness, and updating our maps with the location and numbers of the darkspawn. 

It was not long after dawn that Tristrum found me there. 

“Hail, Will,” he said. “Happy new year.”

I turned to face him, and smiled. 

“Hail, Tristrum. The same to you, my friend.”

He came to stand beside me, and put his hands upon the table. For a moment, the two of us just listened to the winter wind howling through the battlements. 

“We lost another cartload of supplies along the Road of Bones,” he said. “Callum and the rest of his men were attacked about a mile out of Furnacehammer. Half of them didn't make it back. Callum barely escaped with his life.”

I sighed, and placed my hands down on the table alongside his. I stared down at my fingers.   
Tristrum looked across at me—gauging my state of mind. 

He said, “We cannot go on like this, Will.”

I closed my eyes, and conceded.

“No,” I said. “No, we can't.”

The winter wind kept singing.

“All right,” I said at last on the back of a breath. “Call off the search for food and survivors. We have pressed out as far as we may without putting ourselves in more danger than its worth, and the horde is beginning to close in.

“How is Callum?”

Tristrum crossed his mirror-polished arms with the rattle of cold metal, and nodded his assent.  
“He's all right. The others are a little shaken, but Callum's tougher than he looks.”

“He's from Antrefel, isn't he?”

Tristrum nodded. 

“So he tells me, yes.”

A smile tugged at my mouth. 

“They make them tough up there,” I told him. “They also teach them how to hold a bow.”

“He's a good shot,” Tristrum agreed. “He could give most of Rye's archers a run for their money.”

“Then have him organise three hunting parties and search every bit of scrub and moorland within three hours walk from here for anything that moves and is less likely to eat us than we are to eat it,” I said. “Tell him to recruit anyone he can from the men and women that have been manning the search parties, and go to Rye for the rest. He can send anyone he doesn't need back to the guild of works to be reassessed. It's too dangerous out there for anyone that doesn't know what they're doing.”

Tristrum hesitated. 

“And would you like me to help him organise the hunting parties?”

I shook my head. 

“From what I've heard of Callum, he's capable enough to manage on his own,” I said. “I have other plans for you, Knight-Lieutenant.”

Tristrum gave me a lopsided, nervous smile.

“Oh?”

I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I need you to organise the courts for me, Tris,” I told him. “Rye has a provincial justice system that was running out here before the Blight, and a few local judges to give people the right of redress, but the Blight has thrown the whole system into chaos. I need someone to take charge and put it all in order.”

He stepped back from me, and frowned. 

“A judge?” he said. “Me? Are you out of your mind, Will? I'm a templar!”

“Not any more,” I reassured him. “I don't care whose symbols are on the armour you're wearing.”  
He said nothing, and I held his gaze to show him I was serious. 

“I need you,” I said. “I need someone to fix this. To ensure that the people feel as though they have the law on their side. Someone who knows the difference between right and wrong.”

I shrugged my shoulders a little. 

“That person is you, Tristrum. It has always been you. And, when the people feel as though the law is there to protect them and give them shelter, I will need you to help me organise the apostate mages that we have here. To help me find a better balance between the watcher, and the watched.”

Tristrum held up his hands in a mixture of desperation and surrender. 

“Will, I don't know anything about the laws of this arling--”

“You don't have to. _There are no laws_. And there is no room and no resources to imprison anyone even if we wanted to. Just do what is _right_ , Tris. That's all I ask.

Tristrum ran his fingers over his hair. 

“I'll do my best,” he said, and turned to leave. “You know, sometimes I wonder what I let myself in for when I let you out of that Tower, Will.”

I laughed, and turned my attention back to the grey-white light coming in through the snow. 

“I know you do,” I told him. “But you only have yourself to blame for that one, I'm afraid.”


	47. 3 Wintermarch 9:30 Dragon

I have begun my work assessing the apostates that have presented themselves to the guild of works.   
There are seven of them in total. Mostly dabblers and frightened children who have been on the run from the templars their entire lives, but there are two healers amongst them, and two more than show promise that they may be trained. 

For now, I have returned the others to the guild that will doubtless have no trouble finding uses for their unique powers, and have told them to go directly to Tristrum if they face hostility from the general population. They are apprehensive about trusting their futures to a former templar, but the fact that I am an apostate myself has made the whole process easier. 

We have asked each work group to elect a representative from amongst themselves. These representatives, in turn, shall elect a councilman or tradesmen to stand for all those within their trade, and they shall be responsible for bringing any concerns to us when they arise.

As it stands, we have managed to eradicate much of the conflict and violence that was blossoming in the city when we arrived, but we cannot depend on things remaining that way as the months pass and no end comes to the Blight. 

If it is indeed a full Blight as some are saying, then we may have to hold this city for several years before we have any kind of respite from it. 

We are already eating more food than we can hope to produce this summer. 

One of the healers I have found amongst the city's magi—a young elf named Albany—has already begun to prove herself more useful than I could have hoped for. She is quiet, and timid in conversation, but there is fire in her eyes, and her heart overflows with compassion for those in her care. 

I have asked her to meet with the senior surgeons and apothecaries to discuss the foundation of a clinic in the city. The request terrified her, but then, it was intended to. 

If she has the strength to help manage the treatment of Hinter's sick and frail then it shall be a huge weight off of my shoulders, and I shall need to know sooner rather than later whether she is up to the task.


	48. 12 Guardian 9:31 Dragon

Darkspawn attacks have become increasingly more frequent. 

Food supplies are scarce, and the weather has still not broken. 

The people are beginning to starve.


	49. 5 Drakonis 9:31 Dragon

Events in the city have kept me too occupied to write here. 

We are managing to hold off the darkspawn for now, but there are rumours of a massive force gathering to the south. If it is true, then we shall struggle to fight them. We have been under almost constant siege for a little over a month now, and our troops are not well-trained enough to hold off a large, co-ordinated attack. 

None of us are generals here. 

The city walls have taken steady damage, and I have ordered that the Chantry House be de-constructed to provide the stone to repair them. That upset the Fereldens particularly, who see it as a desecration of their faith, but we have tried to give them an alternative place of worship. I have attempted to be as sensitive as I can with the issue—which is to say that I have let Tristrum deal with it, and he has managed to convince them that this is the best way forwards.

He has done well with our nascent legal system, but it is beginning to buckle under the constant pressure or starvation. He strives always to be fair, even when we cannot always do what is right.   
The control of food supplies has become by far and away our most desperate concern. Hinter has always been filled with Highmoor's merchant class—a mixture of Ascellan and Ferelden. In the beginning, they were reluctant to surrender their supplies to us, and since then it has been a constant battle to keep corruption out of our distribution network. Tristrum has not yet had to enforce the penalty of exile upon any of them, but it is only a matter of time. 

I have been spending as much time as I can with Albany, who is now as good as managing the clinic without my assistance. There are so few hours to spare that we have taken to making our morning patrols together along the ramparts. I have been teaching her what magic may be of use to her, and she has slowly been building up the courage to argue politics with me. 

She has a heart of fire and rebellion inside of her, but she is still afraid of me. I must continue to be patient. Still, she has exceeded my every expectation, and I am grateful for her. She is brave, gentle and kind, and has proven herself more than capable of everything that I have thrown at her.   
I doubt that I shall ever have children of my own now. Even if we should survive the Blight, I am too old and have lost the only person that I should ever have wanted to raise a family with, but Albany has become like a daughter to me.

We must all continue to focus on these small victories. They are the things that shall keep us alive.


	50. 20 Drakonis 9:31 Dragon

The attacks grow worse by the day. From the battlements, we can see a mass of thousand upon thousand of darkspawn gathering along the Imperial Highway. Some people believe that they are heading south to Denerim. 

That all of Ferelden shall fall. 

The rain has begun to fall, and we have a little water to quench our thirst, but starvation is wearing us down and poisoning us from within. 

We slaughtered the last of the dairy stock two weeks ago, and have had to exile more than a dozen merchants for taking more than their share of the food. 

Revolution has started to threaten.

We have begun to eat the dead.


	51. 10 Cloudreach 9:31 Dragon

We now fight each other almost as frequently as we fight the darkspawn. 

A riot last week left two dozen people dead, and one of our rooftops gardens burned in the chaos.   
This morning, I have seen a dozen more executed for their part in all of it. 

It is no longer safe for me to go out alone, and Rye has had to muster half a dozen of his guardsmen to protect me from me own people. 

Tristrum has begun to despair. I can see it in his eyes, and in the set of his shoulders. 

I can see it in my own. 

We cannot go on like this much longer. 

There are rumours that people have begun to murder one another so that they may eat the bodies.


	52. Summerday 9:31 Dragon

We have finally begun to see the harvest of some of the early-cropping plants in our city gardens, and not a moment too soon. 

For the past month, protests have become increasingly more frequent. A week ago, I finally saw sense enough to abandon my guardsmen and put my life in the hands of my people. A riot had killed almost twenty of us, and I left the keep in the middle of the night to assist Albany at the clinic. 

I survived the experience, barely, and since then things have begun to grow a little better. I have had to learn to let the people hold me to account, even when such action may well get us killed. Our situation is no less precarious for it, but I am more comfortable in my own skin. 

And it is just as well, because Rye's scouts have brought us terrible news: There is an army of darkspawn that will most likely be on top of us within the week. 

We have ordered further emergency repairs to the walls, and have given over the keep to the civilian population. Rye has brought in a curfew, and no one who is not able to hold a sword or fire a bow is permitted outside of its walls after the night falls. 

That is the best chance their best chance of survival. It may be their only chance.

I think most of the civilian population here have given themselves over to despair by degrees.   
We are each of us prepared for death. 

I had asked Albany to go to the keep with her people, but she refuses to do so, and I do not have the heart to press her on the matter. 

I shall do everything that I can to protect her from the coming nightmare, but I fear that it shall not be enough. 

Soon, we shall have to go to war.


	53. 6 Bloomingtide 9:31 Dragon

The battle has taken a miserable toll on each of us. 

More than a thousand are dead. 

Hundreds more are dying, or else are infected with the Taint. 

The smell of death is everywhere. 

Now we can only wait. Wait, and hope that the worst of it has passed. 

We have seen the dragon overhead. If no one in Ferelden can kill it, we shall not hold out for long.


	54. 7 Bloomingtide 9:31 Dragon

There will be no saving what is left of my eye. 

I have had to remove it myself. 

Albany is still near death. 

We shall know by the morning whether the Taint has claimed her.


	55. 9 Bloomingtide 9:31 Dragon

After almost a month of drought, the rain now falls both day and night. 

It is a blessing upon us all. 

Albany has begun to recover, and although we are still under attack each night, I have begun to hope that we may yet hold them off. 

The cost has been too terrible to comprehend. 

Four months ago there were seven thousand people here. Now, little more than four thousand of us left.


	56. 15 Bloomingtide 9:31 Dragon

Most of the curtain wall has been made safe again, thanks in no small part to the assistance of the mages who have helped us raise the stones back into place, just as the Tevinter did in the days of the Imperium. 

I must talk about the battle, no matter how much I have tried to put it from my mind.   
Rye first spotted the darkspawn on the horizon close to nightfall on the 6th, and sent for me immediately. 

It was such a beautiful sunset—amber and burnished gold with the wind blowing from the east through the struggling blossoms of whinflower on the moor. The land as yellow as the flag the flies above our battlements. 

We did not speak a single word. 

The moon rose waxing gibbous in the deep and endless blue, and as it did, Tristrum and Rye left me to prepare our people for battle. 

I remained alone up there, and simply watched the darkspawn come. 

The lit their torches and their arrows while they were still almost a league away, and we doused the gardens and the roofs of our houses with what little water we had left and hoped against hope that, if we survived, that wind would bring us rain. 

Albany came to me then. Her hands were shaking, and I took her fingers in mine. 

From somewhere inside the keep, I heard some people begin to sing an old Ascellan guild song to keep away despair. The notes of it seemed to twist and weave into the building wind. 

And then the darkspawn were upon us. 

We loosed every spear and arrow that we had into them, but this time it proved futile. They were too many, and before the last of the light had gone out of the east, they were scaling the walls—a black mass of crawling horrors sent straight out of a nightmare to kill us. 

We fought, and for the longest time it looked as though we might have held them, but they had not yet played their whole hand. I have known since we arrived here that the metal cullis over the river outlet by the keep was the biggest structural weakness that we had, but what could we do? It is simpler to fight the darkspawn that to fight the flow of a river that has passed through this city for as long as men and elves have walked these lands.

And so, when we first arrived here, we lowered down both sets of cullises over the archways, and had the guild of works assigned men and women to keep them clear of debris. We reinforced the walls around them, and we hoped. 

That night, our luck finally ran out. 

The darkspawn planted explosives beneath the arches of the outlet. 

After that, nothing could stop them. 

The explosion tore a hole the size of a mansion in the walls, and in the side of the keep,. It threw chunks of stone the size of cartwheels across the city that tore into the houses, and into the ranks of men and women that were meant to be defending it. 

It was then that I lost my eye. Some piece of stone or shrapnel as best as I can tell. I lost consciousness for a short time. By the time I came around, Rye was dragging me to my feet and the darkspawn were swarming into the rent that they had made in the keep—butchering everyone they came across. 

I felt certain then that the battle had been lost. And yet, all around me the people were still fighting.   
They were still fighting. 

And I could not give in. 

We pulled almost everyone we had back to plug the hole in the walls, and keep the darkspawn away from the people inside the keep. 

The remains of the curtain wall provided us with a natural choke point, and we only had to hit them once or twice before they were swept away by the poison waters of the Hinter. Rye sent the remainder of his archers up onto the broken walls to rain bloody death down upon the monsters and the ogres that were pushing through the breech. 

We could hear the screams of the people inside the castle. The broken strains of old Ascellan guild songs. Tristrum gathered together twenty or so of our best soldiers and went inside—fighting from room to room and evacuating everyone that was still alive in there. 

And then it rained. 

It rained, and with the falling water our fortunes finally began to turn. 

It doused the fires that were burning in the gardens and on the thatched roofs of the houses. The lightening tore the sky asunder. I looked up at it, and in the echo of its silver light, I saw it: The shadow of the great archdemon as it moved across the sky. 

It was heading southwards. By now, it will be in Denerim. 

I do not know how we managed to hold the city until morning, but somehow, we did. 

By the time the sun rose, I was bleeding and disorientated, and surrounded by dead soldiers and civilians. I did not know where Tristrum or Albany were, I had exhausted my body and my mana, and it was only Rye's quick wits that had saved my life at least a dozen times. 

With the morning, the last of the darkspawn fled north towards the Road of Bones. We had survived, and the city of Hinter was still in the hands of the Ascellan, with a golden flag flying above her keep. 

Many have lost their entire families. 

I count myself the most fortunate man in all of Highmoor that I still have mine around me.


	57. 25 Bloomingtide 9:31 Dragon

The repairs to the city walls are almost as complete as we can make them. 

We continue to fend off the darkspawn as best we can. By some stroke of fortune we have been spared another coordinated assault. If that was to come, then there is no way we could withstand it.   
Albany is on her feet today for the first time since the battle. 

We have been burning our dead—building huge pyres outside the city gates and letting the wind carry the smell of death away from us. The fires set the evening sky aflame with gold and amber.   
With the summer, it has become apparent that the whin has survived the Blight, and its blessed yellow flowers are blanketing the moor. We have begun to feed the flowers to the people, cut its branches for our fires, and use the ashes to fertilise the gardens. 

We may yet wake from this nightmare.


	58. 18 Justinian 9:31 Dragon

It has been two weeks now since we last saw the darkspawn. 

We have begun to hope that maybe it is over. That the archdemon is dead. 

I hope with my whole heart that it is true.


	59. 29 Kingsway 9:31 Dragon

Today we have had our first contact with the outside world in more than half a year. A group of mercenaries heading south from Redcliffe to see what the Blight has left behind. 

They have confirmed the hope that we have held above all others: The Blight is over, and the darkspawn have fled from the land into the dark. 

They say that they found no other living soul, no pockets of resistance, no life of any kind as far north from here as Lothering. The entire Hinterlands has been laid barren by the Blight. 

There are less than four thousand Ascellan men and women in this city. 

They are the last of a great Chasind tribe that have survived here since prehistory. 

There are no words that can contain the enormity of it.


	60. Satinalia 9:31 Dragon

I have not found much time to write these past few months, but there are some things that I need to make the time to do.

We have achieved that which, a few months ago, seemed impossible. Not only have we held this city, but we have done so much more than just survive. We have established a self-regulating free city which may now begin to thrive. 

Our people are still heavily dependent on our rooftop gardens, as much of the land beyond the city walls is dead, but we have been successful in establishing a few small farms on the best patches of land that should get us through the winter, and our hunting parties now have more luck on the moors. 

Rye has sent scouting parties out to all the major settlements in Highmoor. They have found only death and blackened earth, but with time these places may still live once more. 

We are all Ascellan citizens in Hinter now, and we shall not give up this land again. 

As the darkness subsides, the city becomes increasingly more delicate to govern, but so far we are weathering the storm. Tristrum has ensured that the courts offer a free and fair right of redress for us all, and that no one is left in a cell to rot. A system where no man is greater than his fellows. Where the community is valued above individual greed. And where, in time, Ascellan trade shall flourish in a land free from foreign chains. 

The longer we are free from the darkspawn, the more mercenaries and even trading caravans come south out of Redcliffe and the remains of Lothering, and we are able to barter for anything that we cannot produce ourselves, and have managed to purchase a scant number of dairy stock that shall make the winter easier.

Now that there are fewer sick and injured amongst us, Albany has been able to take over the regulation of the courts from Tristrum. He, in turn, has been helping me to establish a school for our young mages, and assisting in the recruitment of Watchers from the city's guard to work with them. We have begun to show these apostates a life of freedom and personal responsibility far removed from the locked doors of the Circle Tower. 

We may not all be of a single mind, but we are _all_ working together to make this city as strong, as fair, and as free as we have dreamed of. 

We hold elections on First Day. 

I can scarcely believe that I will have survived to govern this city for a year by the time they come.   
My only hope is that all of this new-found prosperity may last that long.


	61. First Day 9:32 Dragon

Through the tireless work of my closest friends, I have been returned to oversee the running of this city for a second year. 

The winter is bitter, but we have spent the autumn recovering the metal and timber from the wasteland that stretches out on all sides of us. The forges of Highmoor have begun to glow again, and we have been able to trade the weaponry that we have crafted for food and supplies enough to keep us comfortable. 

The state ownership of everything that we produce has served us well in times of war and famine, but the people have become increasingly unsettled with it, and I have offered my assurances that once this winter is over they will once again be awarded the fruits of their own labour. 

We existed for too long in a system that denied us that. Owning what we produce must be the most fundamental right of every Ascellan in Hinter. 

For now, we are wealthy enough to share what that labour has gifted to us, at least, and tonight the city is alive with laughter and lanterns as we celebrate the pure darkness of the First Day.

I have taken the first meal of this new year with those to whom I owe everything I have: With Rye, and Tristrum, and Albany. 

The future presents us with problems far different from anything we have tackled so far.   
But we are ready to face them.


	62. 12 Drakonis 9:32 Dragon

It has finally happened, then. 

Arl Ailan's army has been spotted on the Imperial Highway, flying the accursed spoked wheel and crossed swords of the flag the Fereldens have imposed on us. 

There can be no doubt in it: He is heading southwards to reclaim his city from us. The city that he abandoned to the Blight. The city that we have held with our own blood more more than a full year.   
I struggle not to feel as though we have lost everything. We cannot hold off an army. We are too few, and our defences still too damaged. 

A band of mercenaries who we have had good relations with brought us word that Ailan knows Tristrum and Rye by name as well as myself, and that he has placed a bounty on our heads. There is a rumour that Ferelden's new queen has been murdered. 

We cannot linger here. 

The people of the city have suffered enough loss in the last twelve months. The vast majority of them are in no state to fight for a matter of principle, and Ailan shall no doubt tear this arling apart trying to find us if he must. 

I suppose I cannot hate him with my whole heart for it. I am a wanted terrorist. An apostate mage. An outcast. And now we hear that the throne of Ferelden is empty. The banns shall all be fighting tooth and nail for what position they may gain from it. 

The three of us shall flee the city at nightfall and trek east towards the Brecilian Forest. There, we may lay low enough for long enough that Arl Ailan finds that he has other problems. And, when that happens, we shall come back and take this land for good.

We have good men and women around us—humans and elves who have proven themselves a thousand times over the last year. We have instructed them to gather their things and their people, and use the confusion of the arl's return to disappear into the city, or slip into the surrounding countryside. Ailan no doubt will attempt to resettle one or two of the most important towns to Highmoor's industry—most likely Furnacehammer and the Crossing—and once he does that our people may further dissolve into the infrastructure of expansion, and ensure that everything that we have lived by is preserved. 

Our allies here shall manage our courts for those that refuse to submit to so-called Ferelden justice. They will maintain a fighting force against anyone who would oppress us. They will hold fast to a system of free and fair representation for our workers, so that when we strike our final blow upon Arl Ailan's head, everything will still be as we have left it and we may easily undo this terrible injustice.

I have left Albany to oversee my part in all of it. It pains me beyond reason. She is my daughter, and it is all that I want in this world to protect her from men like Ailan. But she understands our courts, how we should treat our mages, and how we should see to our injured, better than any one of us. There is no person I would rather trust with the future of our people. 

The hour draws close. 

And I must pack my things.


End file.
